Day 110: Roma, Seen From Colonia Roma
On a street in Mexico City's Colonia Roma, Leopoldo (A) and Jaime (B), neighbors in their early sixties, talk about Cuarón's film Roma, which is set in the neighborhood in the early 1970s and follows Cleo, a live-in maid.
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
¿Ya vio, vecino? Otra vez hay turistas tomándole fotos a la casa donde filmaron Roma.
Have you seen, neighbor? There are tourists taking photos of the house where they filmed Roma again.
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B
Desde el Óscar no paran. Para mí, la película idealiza la colonia de aquellos años.
They haven't stopped since the Oscars. If you ask me, the movie idealizes the neighborhood as it was back then.
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A
¿Idealiza? A mí me pareció idéntica: es aquí donde jugaba de niño, y así se veía la calle.
Idealizes? It looked identical to me: this is where I played as a boy, and that's exactly how the street looked.
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B
Si Cuarón la hubiese filmado en color, se verían las fachadas descarapeladas y nadie hablaría de poesía.
If Cuarón had shot it in color, you'd see the peeling façades and nobody would be talking about poetry.
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A
El blanco y negro no embellece nada: así recuerda uno la infancia, con melancolía y sin prisa.
Black and white doesn't make anything prettier: that's how you remember your childhood, melancholy and unhurried.
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B
Usted la recuerda desde la sala. Mi mamá, que trabajaba de planta aquí enfrente, la recordaba desde la azotea.
You remember it from the living room. My mother, who was a live-in maid in the house across the street, remembered it from the rooftop.
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A
No lo sabía. Pero fue a una trabajadora como su mamá a quien Cuarón puso en el centro.
I didn't know that. But it was a maid like your mother that Cuarón put at the center of it.
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B
Se lo concedo, aunque si mi mamá hubiese visto la película, diría que esa Cleo tenía demasiado tiempo para mirar aviones.
I'll grant you that, though if my mother had seen the movie, she'd say that Cleo had far too much time for watching airplanes.
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A
Pues ándele, le invito un café, y usted me cuenta cómo se veía la Roma desde la azotea.
Well, come on, let me buy you a coffee, and you can tell me what Roma looked like from the rooftop.
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