Spanish laughs in j, and the reason is pure phonetics.
In Spanish, the letter h is silent and the letter j makes the sound that English spells with an h. Written haha, a Spanish speaker reads aa. Written jaja, they read the laugh. Every language in this series has ended up at a different spelling of the same noise for the same kind of reason: Brazilians land on kkkkk, the French on mdr, Spanish speakers on jaja.
But Spanish goes further than the others, because the vowel is doing work.
The laughter system
jaja: open, straightforward laughter. The default.
jeje: smaller, more mischievous, sometimes slightly embarrassed. The laugh of someone who has just admitted something.
jiji: childlike or conspiratorial, and often affectionate.
jojo: rare, and usually deliberate, with a whiff of Father Christmas about it.
jajajajajaja: length works as it does in Portuguese. More letters, more laughter.
jsjsjs / xd: younger forms. Jsjsjs comes from typing jajaja badly at speed and then keeping it on purpose. Xd is the old emoticon promoted to a word, and it has come back into fashion at least twice.
If you learn nothing else here, learn that jeje is not jaja. Spanish speakers pick between them deliberately and reading them as interchangeable loses information.
The core abbreviations
q: que. The single most common shortening in written Spanish.
xq / pq: porque or por qué. The x stands for por, from the multiplication sign, which is a genuinely elegant piece of reasoning.
x fa / porfa: por favor, please. Porfa also survives perfectly well in speech.
tqm: te quiero mucho, I love you a lot. Affectionate rather than romantic, sent to friends and family without hesitation. tq is the shorter form.
bss: besos, kisses, as a sign-off.
salu2: saludos, greetings, using dos for the number. A rebus form of the same generation as the French koi29, and about as dated.
finde: fin de semana, the weekend. Clipped rather than abbreviated, and completely standard in speech as well.
dejar en visto: to leave on read. Me dejó en visto. The crispest phrase for this in any of these languages.
The newer layer
Spanish borrows English verbs and conjugates them without apology.
stalkear: to look through someone's old posts. Fully conjugated: lo stalkeé entero.
shippear: to want two people to be together, from the English fandom sense of shipping.
cringe: borrowed whole, used as a noun and an adjective. Qué cringe.
random: borrowed whole, and used more loosely than in English, closer to odd or unexpected.
postureo: this one is Spain's own, and it is excellent. The act of posing, of curating an image for show. Puro postureo dismisses an entire social media aesthetic in two words, and English has no equivalent that lands as hard.
The two rooms
The thing that actually confuses learners is not the vocabulary but the split.
The family WhatsApp group runs on buenos días messages with sunrise images, tqm, bss, full punctuation and voice notes from relatives. It is warm, it is formal-ish, and it uses almost none of the vocabulary in the previous section.
The feed runs on jsjsjs, borrowed English verbs, cringe and clipped everything. Different register, different generation, frequently the same person.
Spanish speakers move between these two rooms fluently and without comment. Learners who take vocabulary from one room into the other are the only people who notice.
The regional layer, briefly
Written Spanish carries its geography as clearly as spoken Spanish does.
tío and tía in Spain, wey or güey in Mexico, boludo in Argentina, parce in Colombia. All of them mean approximately mate, all of them are unmistakable markers, and the traps around the Argentine one are covered in the regional Spanish article.
Why this is worth learning deliberately
Because a very large share of the Spanish you will actually read is written like this, and none of it appears in a course. Xq is not lookupable. Postureo will not be in your dictionary. Jeje looks like a typo until somebody explains that it is not.
And because the laughter distinction is a genuine piece of information about tone that you would otherwise simply be missing, message after message.
How to keep them
Save the message and the room it came from. Tqm = I love you a lot is incomplete without the fact that it arrived from an aunt.
Paste the whole line into Translate. Abbreviated Spanish reconstructs from context and not from the individual pieces.
Then let repetition install them. Around thirty forms, all of them frequent, done inside a fortnight.
The short version
Laugh in jaja, and learn that jeje means something slightly different. Learn q, xq, porfa and finde, which cover most of the traffic. Learn dejar en visto because you will need it.
And learn postureo, because once you have the word you will start seeing the thing everywhere.
Got a Spanish message full of letters that were not words? Paste it into Vokabulo and keep what it meant. Free to start on iPhone and iPad. 💬
