Learn the Mexican slang
they don't teach
in duolingo.

One Mexican Spanish word a day, explained properly. Each morning a new word goes up with what it means, where it came from, and a short dialogue so you can hear two people actually using it. It started as notes on my phone after about a year of laughing along at jokes I hadn't understood. Free, no account, nothing to install.

People with a Mexico problem to solve. You're moving to CDMX next month, or coming for two weeks, or you've been here a year and the group chat still loses you halfway. You're dating someone Mexican whose friends switch register the second they relax. You work with a team whose side conversation isn't in English. If you want conjugation tables there are better sites — this one is about sounding like a person.

No, you can start from zero. Everything is explained in English, with pronunciation and enough context to know when a word fits. Heritage speakers turn up here a lot too — people who grew up hearing this at their grandmother's house and never once saw it written down. For them it's usually the etymology that's the draw.

Everyday spoken Mexican Spanish from Mexico City and central Mexico — chilango, if you want the local word for it. Slang, expressions, interjections, dichos, the occasional albur. The metro, the taquería, the work WhatsApp thread at midnight. Not business Spanish, and not the Spanish from your textbook that nobody has ever said out loud.

Very. The grammar is shared, the slang barely overlaps at all. A Spaniard says tío, a Mexican says güey, an Argentine says che — same job, three words, and picking the wrong one marks you instantly. Mexico also uses ustedes where Spain uses vosotros, and carries Nahuatl words nobody outside the country uses. Learning Mexican slang from a Spain-focused course is how people end up sounding faintly odd in CDMX.

Apps teach you the Spanish that gets you through an airport. This is the Spanish for after you leave it. Duolingo won't tell you that ahorita means five minutes or never depending on who says it, or which words are funny with friends and career-limiting at a work lunch. That's tone, and tone is the part that takes years to pick up on your own.

Not if you read the page first. The spicier words carry a tone note telling you who you can use them with and exactly where they'll land badly. Knowing a word is the easy half. Noticing that your partner's mother just walked into the kitchen is the half nobody teaches, and it's why these pages are longer than a dictionary line.

Understanding comes fast, saying it takes longer. Most people start catching slang in conversation within a few weeks of actually listening for it. Using it without sounding like you rehearsed in the mirror takes months, because it's timing more than vocabulary. One word a day sounds slow until you compare it to a list of fifty you'll have forgotten by Thursday.

Yes, all of it. Every word page, quiz, blog post, and karaoke video, with no login and no paywall, and the newsletter is free too. The site runs ads — that's the entire business model, and I'd rather say so plainly than bury it in a footer.

Partly, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. AI helps me research faster and get a first draft down. Then I rewrite it, check it against how people actually talk here, and bin the drafts that read like a translation engine rather than patching them. Native speakers email me corrections, and those go straight into the pages — it's easily the most useful mail I get. The longer version is on the about page.

Andrey the Nomad — one person, no team, no investors. I'm a digital nomad who kept meaning to leave Mexico and kept not doing it. This began as a list of words I didn't understand and got comprehensively out of hand. More on the author page.