Ready to take your storytelling to the next level (and beyond, jiji)?
Well, this lil chunkety-chunk-chunk is gonna help you do that!
Basically, when telling a story, a simple
y ya can move things along to the next stage, consequence or final event.
⏩ I like to think of it as a little button you press to fast-forward a story to the next important bit!
A bit like:
👉
and then… / and that was that…
Don't believe me?
Well, that's why we're creating our own corpus of real Mexican Spanish…
Check out how
Rubén the ruletero (at approx. 06:52) uses it:
Y te da mucho coraje y ya… ya cuando menos sientes, ya estás pegando, ya están peleando.And it makes you really angry, and then… before you know it, you’re throwing punches and fighting.
So, here,
y ya moves the story from him
getting angry to what happens next:
the fight.
And here's another example
(at approx. 06:02):
—La muchacha le dijo: “No seas pendejo, déjalo.”
—Y ya me soltó.—The girl told him: “Don’t be an idiot, let him go.”
—And then he let me go.
Here,
y ya introduces the final event of that particular story.
But
y ya doesn’t necessarily mean the story is over.
It can simply introduce the next stage
(at approx. 14:56):
—Y en eso te llega la patrulla: “Bájese”.
—Y ya: “A ver, ¿por qué te pasaste el semáforo?”—And then the police pull up: “Step out of the car.”
—And then it’s: “All right, why did you run the light?”
The story continues afterwards;
y ya has simply moved us into the police questioning stage.
And here's a good one from
Emilio the maguey magician (at approx. 12:00):
Here he's explaining how to make fiber from a maguey plant:
Y ya la fibra se va tejiendo en una rueca.And then the fibre is spun on a spinning wheel.
Y ya puedes armar unos pedazos de tela.And then you can make pieces of cloth.
So yeah, he's using
y ya to advance to the next step of a process!