Cómo se toma el mate en Argentina y Uruguay

What does “mate” mean in Spanish?

Mate is the bitter, caffeinated drink of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil, and it is also the hollowed gourd it is sipped from: as the teacher says, el recipiente también se llama mate. The leaves it is brewed from are yerba mate, or hierba mate as he calls them in the clip, and they come from a small tree, not a grass. The gourd’s name came first: mate is from Quechua matí, “calabash,” so the cup lent its name to the drink.

The clip is Dreaming Spanish, so a Spanish teacher explains the ritual very slowly: el mate se toma en Argentina, en Uruguay, en Paraguay y en el sur de Brasil, and one person pours the hot water and hands the same gourd round the circle again and again (Argentines call that person the cebador, a word the clip itself does not use). He also drops a useful figure: five kilos of yerba a year per person in Argentina, ten in Uruguay. Listen for se toma and se bebe side by side: both mean the drink is drunk, and tomar is the everyday choice, as in tomar un café. And añade agua, “adds water,” is the verb you saved earlier as añado.