“Hola”

“Como Estas”

“Muy Bien, y tu?”

The first simple phrases taught in beginning Spanish courses are often ones of a simple greeting, a how are you, and an optimistic reply with conversational repartee. For those with no background in Spanish, these phrases are often fumbled from the mouth, with the awkward pronunciations of a three year old practicing the first smatterings of a fresh, unripened language. Language courses in High School and College aside, the Rosetta Stone program has been the long-standing pinnacle of learning language on your own, replacing those tired audio tapes and phrase books that leave you with little applicable skills when approaching native speakers. But a new iPhone app called TooCoolSpanish by developer Michael Lawrence Ellis III of Slanguage claims to teach Spanish in a new and creative way, going so far as to coyly and jokingly poke the assertion they’ll put Rosetta Stone out of business.

Normally, in a Spanish language class students are taught the alphabet, the core of the language, wrapping their mouths around the foreign pronunciations and the presence of letters that, unlike English, are seemingly a compounded block of syllables, like doble elle (LL), i griega (Y), and zeta (Z). Rather than focusing on the language’s core, Too Cool Spanish instead formulates creative and interesting phonetic abstractions accompanied by pictorial cues that allow you to sound out the Spanish word and, hopefully, make it easier. The phrase Mi amigos - meaning “my friends” in Spanish – is constructed into a strangely American phrase of mia me goes, that in a way effectively mimes the Spanish pronunciation of mi amigos. Native Spanish speakers have a tendency to roll syllables together in a kind of rapid-fire speech that often confuses non-native speakers as to the specific delineations between concrete words, and the phrase mia me goes manages to mimic that syllabic colliding.

However, what breaking the sounds down phonetically does not accomplish is recreating those special accents that exist within the Spanish language – when pronouncing d as in nada (meaning “nothing”) Spanish speakers will enunciate with a dental sound, placing the tongue near the teeth at the roof of the mouth, softening the harsh d sound of English to one more closely resembling our interdental th sound (say aloud “natha” as opposed to “nada”). In the phrase mia me goes, American English speakers will logically – as according to the unconscious culture of their native language – place the stressed accent on the i in mia, with me and goes falling flat and soft, undefined, whereas the Spanish phrase mi amigos would have the ami accented, with the latter syllable being more stressed than in an English pronunciation. In part, I want to say the awkward phrasing of Too Cool Spanish could potentially confuse users, leading them to more awkwardly pronounce these Spanish phrases than they would normally, since they’re not intuitive at all – more a puzzle, really, with the odd pictures here and there that may impede understanding the phrase at hand. The strange, phonetic choppiness of the phrases actually create more of a butchered, Americanized accent than you would expect; I felt like a dim-witted, slow speaker when attempting to finagle my mouth and tongue around the phrase moo we cone 10 toe, for muy contento, effectively winnowing my perfect Spanish accent down to nothing as I found myself exaggerating the cone and toe sounds. Easy to learn? These phrases aren’t a shortcut at all.

But, the ineffective pronunciation guide isn’t what is most striking. The biggest problem with Too Cool Spanish – its benign joking aside – is it belittles the process of learning a foreign language. By breaking down Spanish communication into arbitrary phonetic combinations, people using the app will never develop a true feel, or instinct for the language, using instead these cheap ploys to skip corners on proper language acquisition. Too Cool Spanish doesn’t carry intuitively into other avenues of the language, like writing, or even speaking once users realize accents make all the difference in understanding and interacting. In all seriousness, learning a language is a gift, a chore most people take willingly, and one people intuitively learn by engaging with others within the context of their surroundings. It’s too bad Too Cool Spanish has no context, and never will.

So while Too Cool Spanish does elicit a smile from its slight comedic value, I can’t see much permanent use or value for it, even if you are only somewhat serious about learning Spanish.