‘Mañana, manaña…’
The pace of life feels much slower in Spain, Central and South America, doesn’t it?
I lived in South America for 20 years and got quite used to it I must say. It was sooooo noticeable when friends and family came to visit. They walked so quickly!
A great little Spanish phrase to learn for situations just like these is “no rush, there’s plenty of time”.
Ok so imagine you’re in España or America Central or America Latina and you kind of get the vibe that there’s no rush, there’s plenty of time;
“Mañana, manaña…”
You hear that phrase quite a lot and you want to be able to start to speak a little bit more like that you know ‘take your time, slow down a bit’. A great way to do that is with this really handy phrase that you can practice.
The first part of the phrase is to tell somebody that there’s no rush is;
No hay prisa
There’s no rush.
No is the negative, hay means there is or there are and when you put the no before the verb (hay) it makes it negative – is there isn’t/aren’t.
Prisa translates to rush.
So you’re living in Argentina – like I did for many years and your family and friends come to visit you. They come from England and of course everything in England is like rápido rápido – it’s all really quick. And you’re like
Aye no, no hay prisa, manana
The second part of that phrase is that there’s plenty of time. So if you’re new to Spanish you might have a little bit of confusion initially with this part because the word for time in Spanish is the same word that we use to talk about the weather; tiempo. El tiempo is the weather but tiempo also means time.
So, there are two ways you can say the next part of this phrase.
The first option is;
Ya tenemos tiempo
The word ya in Spanish can be translated as ‘still’ depending on how it’s used in the sentence. So the sentence Ya tenemos tiempo translates to we still we have time.
So far we have;
No hay prisa, ya tenemos tiempo – there’s no rush we’ve got time
Another way is by saying that there’s still plenty of time.
Sobra tiempo – there’s plenty of time.
So there you go, got two options. The first one.
No hay prisa, ya tenemos tiempo – there’s no rush we’ve got time
And the second option.
No hay prisa, sobra tiempo – No rush there’s plenty of time.
Hope you find that useful and if you’d like to practice speaking Spanish with all these fabulous new phrases that you’re learning check out my website for an up-and-coming conversation class I’m running in October. It’s an adult’s Spanish conversation class that I run twice a year. Any questions pop them in the comments.
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