Answers
Apr 07, 2014 - 10:43 AM
On a purely anedotal level, where I live in Argentina, I have noticed that "tomar" is used for ordering drinks like tea, coffee or fruit juice, whereas "beber" is used for alcoholic beverages. "Tomar" means 'to have' in general. So, it can include drinking, eating, etc. But "beber" has more limited applications: it can only be used to say, 'to drink'.
At the risk of generalizing (and I welcome any corrections), my experience has been that "tomar" is more commonly used than "beber" in the sense of 'to drink', at least among people from Latin American countries. Because of this I always suspected that "beber" was used more often in Spain, although I have very little evidence to back that up! However, when speaking about types of drink in general, one would invariably use "bebida".
At the risk of generalizing (and I welcome any corrections), my experience has been that "tomar" is more commonly used than "beber" in the sense of 'to drink', at least among people from Latin American countries. Because of this I always suspected that "beber" was used more often in Spain, although I have very little evidence to back that up! However, when speaking about types of drink in general, one would invariably use "bebida".
Apr 07, 2014 - 11:48 AM
Here's another thread with the same question: http://fluenz.com/commons/spanish/pos...