The Spanish at the counter is cansao and algo má', said in one breath.

A minute each, at most, and every one of them turns on the half you did not say.

• The farmacia counter

  In Spain the pharmacist asks what the symptom is, how long you have had it and whether you take anything else, then hands you something without a prescription. Describing the pain is the easy half; the dosage comes back at you once, in a single run.

• Reporting a lost bag

  At the airline desk you are narrating the past under stress: where you checked in, what the case looks like, when you last saw it. Preterite and imperfect back to back, plus a colour, a size and a flight number said aloud.

• Checking in and the deposit

  Apartment and hostel check-ins turn on conditions: the deposit, what happens if you leave late, who to ring if the boiler stops. The answers come as si clauses and future forms, and misreading one is expensive rather than embarrassing.

• Me pones un café

  A bar in Spain runs on shorthand — me pones, ¿qué va a ser?, ¿algo más? — with vosotros for the table and no room to build a full sentence. Nobody is being brusque; the register is simply faster than a classroom.

• Vos tenés, vos podés

  Argentina and Uruguay use vos rather than tú, with its own present-tense forms: vos tenés, vos podés, vení. You need not speak it, but you have to recognise it instantly, because every question put to you will use it.

• Asking directions, hearing the answer

  Asking is the easy half. The answer arrives as one continuous run — a la derecha, en la segunda, al lado de — and by the time you have placed the first landmark, three more have gone past you.

Six things worth rehearsing aloud, and every one of them is about tempo.

Each takes two minutes to practise and comes up on the first day of any trip. The difficulty is tempo — producing them without a run-up, and hearing them back at the speed they are actually said.

• Which pronoun the country uses, sorted before you open your mouth: usted in Bogotá and San José, tú in Spain, vos across the River Plate.
• One object, several names — piscina, alberca, pileta; coche and carro; móvil and celular — and the one you learned may not be the one where you land.
• Verbs that are ordinary in one country and crude in another, coger being the one travellers hit first and hardest.
• Un euro con veinte, el andén número siete — figures said in one piece, which is where most counters and ticket desks lose you.
• Getting a repeat in Spanish: ¿cómo dice?, más despacio, por favor, asked at the first missed word rather than the fourth.
• Distinción in most of Spain, where z and c before e or i are a th sound, against seseo everywhere else: one word, two shapes.

One accent, not twenty

We do one Spanish and there are twenty. What answers you here is clear and broadly neutral, so a Chilean market or a Sevillano bar is still going to be work, and two weeks of practice does not change that. It assumes, too, that you can already build a sentence: what it fixes is the stalling of someone who has the Spanish and cannot produce it at the speed the counter runs at.