8.1: Shopping in a department store

Welcome to Unit 8 of the Live Lingua Spanish Podcast. In this unit you will learn how to shop in a department store, and we'll also cover basic vocab for shopping and lifestyle excursions such as colors in Spanish, sizing of clothes, and how to ask to try on an item.

This 14th episode is a quick recap of Unit 7 of the Live Lingua Spanish Podcast. It offers a congratulations on your hard work so far in learning Spanish.

This is a visualization practice that helps you imagine you are in a Latin American market. You come across one or more souvenirs you want to buy, and decide that the price is too high. So, you negotiate that price down successfully, and come away with your souvenirs.

What happens when the conversation flows back and forth during a market negotiation? After practicing through this 12th episode you will be able to successfully negotiate your way through a negotiation in a Latin American marketplace.

This 11th episode brings together everything you have learned about negotiating for souvenirs in Latin American markets. By now, you should have the terms and sentence structure down to go to a market and come away with the things you want to buy.

Here is your chance to practice. We're going to put you into a (hypothetical) situation in this exercise. The seller is going to give you a price for an item that you would like to buy. It costs too much -- and you should ask for a price 100 pesos less than the one offered.

Now we're going to actually give you the skills (and the terms behind those skills) to negotiate like an experienced market shopper in Latin America. If an item is more expensive than it should be, this episode will teach you how to talk it down to a more appropriate price.

The third part of our "negotiating" series will make you a master negotiator at Latin American markets (after a bit of practice, of course). The final thing we need to add, building on the last two 8th episodes, is asking for multiple items, or items that are plural by nature (like shoes or earrings).

Here we are going to build on what you learned in the past 7th episode to boost your negotiating skills even further. In the previous episode you learned how to ask "How much for this?" Now, we are going to learn how to ask for an item that is farther away from you by asking "How much for that?"

Like all things in Spanish, the gender used when negotiating is very important. After listening to this 6th episode. You will know how to ask how much something costs, while referring to it in the correct gender so as to show proper respect and knowledge of your subject.