Day 153: A Cup You Bring Back
At a small café in Oaxaca city, a customer (A) asks the barista, Zaira (B), about the cups that come with a deposit.
How to study this lesson 3 steps
- Read the situation under the title. It says who is talking and how they know each other, which decides how politely they speak.
- Read the dialogue line by line with its translation, until every line makes sense. Point at (or tap) a Spanish word to see what it means.
- Spend at least 30 minutes listening to native Spanish, for example from the Resources page. It doesn't matter if you don't understand it yet.
Dialogue
Audio recordings are on the way. For now, each lesson is the dialogue with its English translation.
Keys: E hide English · ← → previous / next day · point at a word to see its meaning
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A
Disculpe, ¿por qué me cobraron veinte pesos por el vaso?
Excuse me, why was I charged twenty pesos for the cup?
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B
Es un depósito: se los devolvemos cuando regrese el vaso, aquí o en otros diez cafés.
It's a deposit: we give it back to you when you return the cup, here or at ten other cafés.
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A
¿Otros diez? ¿Y a quién se le ocurrió armar todo eso?
Ten others? And who came up with all that?
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B
A mí y a dos compañeros. Todavía estudiábamos cuando nos tocó recoger la basura de una feria del café: puro vaso desechable.
Me and two classmates. We were still students when we got stuck cleaning up the trash after a coffee fair: nothing but disposable cups.
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A
¿Y los dueños aceptaron así nada más? Me imagino que lo más difícil fue convencerlos.
And the owners just agreed, like that? I imagine the hardest part was convincing them.
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B
Nos decían que la gente se iba a llevar los vasos, y de hecho el primer mes perdimos la mitad.
They kept telling us people would walk off with the cups, and in fact we lost half of them in the first month.
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A
Ay, y yo que pensaba llevármelo de recuerdo. Mañana se lo regreso, para que no digan.
Oh, and there I was planning to take it home as a souvenir. I'll bring it back tomorrow, so nobody can say anything.
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