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LEARNING SPANISH

Six celebrities who are fluent in (Castilian) Spanish

David Beckham may have struggled to string a sentence together in Spanish after four years in Madrid, but other famous faces have reached almost native levels in the language after spending time in España or with Spanish people.

celebrities who speak spanish
Gwyneth Paltrow, US actress and founder and CEO of Goop, became fluent in Spanish while spending a year abroad near Toledo. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP)

Freddie Highmore 

British actor Freddie Highmore, who as a child appeared alongside Johnny Depp in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and ‘Finding Neverland’, is perhaps the most impressive Spanish speaker on the list. The star of ‘The Good Doctor’ TV series spent a year living in Madrid while he was studying and actually has a Galician grandmother. His Spanish accent, his grammar and spoken sentence construction is practically native.

Ivan Rakitic

There are dozens of foreign footballers playing in La Liga who speak Spanish at an almost native level: Frenchman Antoine Griezzman, Belgian Thibaut Cortois, Slovak Jan Oblak. But perhaps the most incredible of all is Croatian midfielder Ivan Rakitic, a former Barça player who’s returned to his old club Sevilla. It was in the Andalusian city where Rakitic met his now wife and where he developed a true Sevillian accent, with all the flair and consonant dropping that it’s famed for.

Gwyneth Paltrow

The American actress turned beauty product guru is a fluent Spanish speaker who mostly conjugates her verbs correctly and hardly has any traces of an American accent (she even pronounces c and z in the traditional Castilian way). It all started when as a teenager Paltrow did a year abroad in Talavera de la Reina near Toledo, where she stayed with a Spanish family who she still visits every time she’s in Spain.  

Jean Reno

You may not have known this, but French superstar Jean Reno’s real name is Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez. Reno was born in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, where his parents fled to from their native Cádiz to escape Franco’s regime. The star of ‘Leon: The Professional’ obviously had a big advantage when it came to learning Spanish, but given that he’s lived most of his life in Morocco and France, his fluency in Spanish is commendable, bar his clear French accent.

James Rhodes

Ever since British-born concert pianist James Rhodes moved to Spain in 2017, he’s voiced his love for everything Spanish, including the language. His work spearheading a law to protect children from sexual abuse in Spain earned him the honour of fast-track Spanish citizenship. Rhodes regularly takes to Twitter, tweeting almost entirely in Spanish and demonstrating a thorough understanding of syntax, slang and more. He’s also more than capable of holding his own when speaking castellano

Michael Robinson

The late Michael Robinson, a British footballer who became Spain’s most famous TV football pundit, was and still is the perfect example of how the most important factor when learning a language is to immerse oneself in the culture and make mistakes without fear. Having been forced into early retirement due to injury while playing for Osasuna, he took on his new job without prior experience and with far from perfect Spanish. He improved despite holding onto his British accent, learnt Spanish expressions and jokes and laughed at his blunders. No wonder he was known as Spain’s most loved Brit.

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LEARNING SPANISH

Spanish Words of the Day: En plan 

Saying ‘en plan’ in Spanish is a bit like…

Spanish Words of the Day: En plan 

En plan is used all the time in spoken Spanish when you want to express intention, mode and attitude.

For example, salimos en plan amigos, ‘we went out as friends’. 

Or estamos en plan fiesta, ‘we’re in party mode’. 

Va vestida en plan militar, ‘she’s wearing military-style clothing’.

In essence, it’s a fast and easier way of setting the scene, a versatile means of describing which is like saying ‘like’, or ‘as’, ‘-mode’ or ‘-style’ in English. 

However, the meanings of en plan have expanded recently thanks to young people, who have adopted it a bit like their filler word or pet phrase (what Spaniards call una muletilla). 

En plan is now used similarly to o sea, used to explain in another way or exemplifies what is being said.

READ MORE: What does ‘o sea’ mean in Spanish?

For example, María está desaparecida, en plan no la veo desde hace más de un año.

‘María has completely disappeared, I mean, I haven’t seen her in more than a year’.

It’s also used when you want to express something as if it were a quote. 

El policía me dijo en plan te voy a multar, ‘the police officer was like ‘I’m going to fine you’’.

Therefore, en plan has become a bit like saying ‘like’ when talking in English and joining ideas together or emphasising something. 

It can be a bit exasperating to hear teens use it all the time, as in:

Hablé con Julia en plan buen rollo, y me dijo en plan eres una cabrona, que ya no quiere ser mi amiga, en plan que no quiere quedar más. 

‘I spoke to Julia on like good terms, and she was like ‘you’re a bitch’, she doesn’t want to be my friend anymore, like she doesn’t want to meet up anymore’.

If you don’t believe us, take Robert De Niro’s and Jack Nicholson’s word for it. 

However, en plan can be a very useful tool to get to the point quickly and avoid more complicated sentence constructions in Spanish.

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