Asking About Prices (part 1 of 3)

Walking up to a fruit stand and asking for exactly what you want is one of the first real conversations most travelers have in Spanish. This part gets you from a friendly greeting to a bag with two kilos of apples in it, without pointing or guessing.

The focus here is greetings, prices, and quantities. The vendor opens with ¿Qué le doy?, the everyday way of asking what you would like, and you work on the questions that follow it, such as ¿A cuánto está el kilo de manzanas? and ¿Cuánto cuestan los plátanos?. You also get comfortable with weight words like medio kilo and with a polite way to order: me da dos kilos, por favor. Numbers and prices in pesos come up naturally, so you are learning them in the situation where you will actually use them. The same patterns work at a bakery, a cheese counter, or a juice stand, which makes this a useful first conversation to have under your belt anywhere in Latin America.