Ahora

Hello everyone, today we'll see a very useful word used every day in spoken spanish. And I'll start to explain it RIGHT NOW, IN THIS MOMENT, or AHORA..

So that's "ahora"'s meaning, pretty straight foward, but if you go to South America, or Mexico you'll be more likely to hear ahora's little sisters: "ahorita" and "ahoritita". Let's see how these words fit in context and understand the conveyed idea, instead of getting stuck with one-word translations.

- "¿Tienes tiempo mañana en la tarde?"
  "No, pero tengo tiempo ahora."

- "Have you got time tomorrow afternoon?"
- "No, but I've got time now."

Another way of using "ahora" that is very common, involves the idea of "from now on...", which can be translated to "A partir de ahora..." but people like to use just "ahora" since it's way shorter and everyone gets the idea.


- La nueva ley hace ilegal el uso de ropa interior; ahora quien use sostén o calzoncillos irá a la cárcel.
- The new law makes wearing underwear illegal; from now on, whoever uses brassiere or briefs will go to jail.

Can you imagine for a second how would the police enforce this law?, well, I suspect that a good emphasized "now" would be enough to express the same idea, but I'm not too sure about it, native speakers enlight me. Either way, this is another way of using "ahora", and if its english equivalent is the same word, it's all good.

Now let's talk about "ahorita"... The only thing my dictionary says about it is: Diminutive of ahora. So, what the heck is a diminutive?
Putting it simple, is a word form that expresses smallness, youth, unimportance or endearment. The only english examples I can think about right now would be "doggy", expressing some sort of affection for a dog, or "booklet", expressing the smallness of a book.
The big difference is that diminutives are used much much more in spanish than in english, I guess that it's because modifying a word into a diminutive is way easier, and there's a simple rule for that, also, almost every word can be turned into a diminutive. But make sure not to use them too often, or you'll sound silly...

How do we make up diminutives in spanish? As easy as adding a couple of endings to any word: "-ito" for male and "-ita" for female. The tricky part might be in remembering what thing is male and what thing is female, but try to memorize as you learn new words.

- La mesa   :  La mesita
- The table :  The little tiny wee table

- El carro  :  El carrito
- The car   :  The tiny car

There you see that a male noun take the -ito ending and a female one takes the -ita one. It's also obvious that we're not just adding the ending to the word, but to the stem, which would be "mes-" for "mesa" and "carr-" for "carro", but let's not get too deep into this issue, seems broader than I thought, anyway...

It's not that "ahora" is femenine, is not even a noun, but an adverb, but since it ends with an "a", we say "ahorita". The funny thing here is that "ahorita" is not the diminutive form of "ahora", I mean, it is, but it expresses a totally different idea, and is used in other kind of situations where a plain "ahora" would sound just weird... And that idea "ahorita" conveys is of a short period of time.

- "¿Cuanto más te vas a demorar?"
  "Espérame que ahorita llego."

- "How much more are you going to take?"
  "Just wait I'll be right there."

Ahorita is the perfect translation for "just a second", "right away", "very soon", "in a minute", "shortly", blah blah blah... But let's see another common usage of the word.

- "¿Ya se fue el bus?"
- "Ahortita se acaba de ir."

- "Is the bus gone?"
- "It just left."

This is very coloquial spanish and you won't hear it from snobbish high status people, but hey, I use it all the time, and you'll hear it every day in this kind of situations. I could have used "ahorita" instead of "ahoritita" in this last example, but the idea is the same. The only diference is that "ahoritita" implies a period of time shorter than the one "ahorita" does. Some people even say "ahoritititititita" but it's more of a funny exaggeration. So what the example sentence above tells is that you just missed your bus by an insignificant amount of time, and you should be really pissed off.

That was my explanation for "ahora", "ahorita" and "ahoritititi......ta"... Just to sum this up, "ahora" means "in this moment" or "now", and it can be used as "from now on" as well. It's diminutive "ahorita" doesn't mean a tiny little "now", but a short period of time, which is not too far fetched actually... Stacking diminutive endings or "-ita"s at the end of "ahorita" will sound like you're talking about a very little short amount of time, and you'll sound a bit more like a native speaker, but don't use it too often! It's more like a silly word, but it's up to you.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, see you soon.