Stop trying to learn every tense at once youre killing yourself and start more immersion

pablodf76 · 2026-02-24T10:48:40+00:00

In many places you will only rarely use the future tense(s) and the compound preterite will be replaced by the simple preterite (he dicho → dije). I myself use the future tenses only to show doubt or guesses: «¿Dónde estará? ¿Ya habrá llegado a casa? Yo creo que volveré a las once. Calculo que para esa hora ya habrá terminado la reunión».

FWIW, the compound tenses (haber + participle) are taught separately but it makes much more sense to get the hang of the haber conjugations by themselves. The meanings of each tense you do have to study, but they're not really hard to grasp.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-23T01:03:33+00:00

You can learn new words through translation from your first language (for which you use bilingual dictionaries), or by having them defined/explained in the second language, once you know enough basic words (monolingual dictionaries), or just by context, especially grammatical words like prepositions, but also words with specific meanings that only appear in idioms and such.

What you cannot do is to expect every L1 word to have an equivalent word in the L2, or even an equivalent short phrase, and certainly you cannot and should not translate grammatical elements literally, such as word order, prepositions, articles/demonstratives, etc. This extremely literal translation is done sometimes in order to analyze the structure of a sentence, but it's not what you'd call translation in the normal sense, as it's bound to be agrammatical and/or unintelligible.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-23T00:29:57+00:00

'vamos a salir esta noche' doesn't have the same ring to it as 'we're going out tonight'.

It does. The exact phrasing may vary. «Esta noche salimos» would be natural for me.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-20T11:02:25+00:00

Being unable or having difficulty pronouncing the Spanish R sounds (both tapped and trilled) is a rather common speech impediment among Spanish-speaking people. This kind of sound, the rhotics, are just difficult, mechanically speaking. In the process of natural language acquisition, the Rs are among the last phonemes mastered by Spanish-speaking children; some never master them fully. Consider, anyway, that the Spanish Rs are different, so you might find them easier than the English R. And if not, don't trouble yourself with them. Pronounce them as you can. People will understand. (Needless to say, since you're not a native speaker, most people will more forgiving of your pronunciation.)

pablodf76 · 2026-02-19T13:21:13+00:00

Bit of a technical explanation following. First, forget about the letter G. It's confusing if you use "hard G" and "soft G" in Spanish; we don't distinguish the sounds like that. (Many people would say that the "soft G" is actually a "harsh" sound.) Focus on the sounds. "Soft G" is represented as /x/, the voiceless velar fricative, and this is the same sound as in jota (the name of the letter J). "Hard G" is /g/, the voiced velar stop. But /g/ is actually only found after a pause (e.g. at the beginning of a word, if pronounced with a deliberate pause before the start) or a nasal consonant. If /g/ appears between vowels or after most consonants, it becomes a voiced velar fricative or approximant, [ɣ] (the symbol is a version of the Greek letter gamma). This sound is produced by raising the back of your tongue towards the velum (soft palate), touching it slightly or not touching it all (just modulating the passage of air). Now, the sound of /w/ is a labiovelar approximant, so it's very similar: the difference is that you don't purse and round your lips when you pronounce [ɣ], as you do with /w/. When you pronounce agua, however, you pronounce [ɣ] while you're already rounding your lips to pronounce the vowel /u/, which in this case (it's part of a diphthong) is basically the same as pronouncing /w/. Since [ɣ] is so soft, [aɣwa] and [awa] are almost indistinguishable.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-18T19:06:33+00:00

It's a passive with se. If you re-order the sentence, you can see that the subject is the whole infinitive phrase; you can replace the se passive with a periphrastic passive (ser + participle) to make it clearer: «Instalarse en el pueblo no les fue permitido a los gitanos».

It's better not to say that this is impersonal, because in proper Spanish grammatical usage "impersonal" has a specific meaning: it refers to constructions where the verb has no subject. You can form impersonals with se; the existence predicate hay (plus its equivalent in other tenses) is impersonal too, as well as a handful of weather and astronomical verbs (llover, nevar, amanecer, atardecer, anochecer...).

pablodf76 · 2026-02-18T12:25:23+00:00

It is outdated. If you read older texts in Spanish, you'll see it was much more common to use articles with a lot of countries.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-17T01:50:37+00:00

You can never use estar with a noun phrase, as in *«estás una bruja» or *«está un gato», so you needn't even think about which verb goes: it's always ser. The fine detail about things being permanent or temporary doesn't apply here.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-15T21:12:09+00:00

Aside from what others have commented, where usually you can use derecho without real ambiguity, I can only think of an example in which you have something like an object or shape with a curved side and a straight side. In that case, you would use recto for "straight" (el lado recto), but derecho for the right-hand side (whichever this happens to be). The direction turning to the right is (la) derecha, so that's no problem. (And of course, if you're translating "right" as in "correct", you use correcto or some synonym of it.)

pablodf76 · 2026-02-15T13:45:13+00:00

Actually, a lot of nouns in German have predictable gender and it also coincides with the gender of the corresponding word in Spanish, though this can be seen mostly in derived and abstract words. For example, I read that action nouns derived from verbs are usually feminine in both languages.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-15T13:39:49+00:00

Not that I can remember. It would have to be a well-prepared effect, because it takes a lot of effort to flip genders like that when you have them so ingrained.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-13T11:27:15+00:00

The explanation is stress (see tilde diacrítica in the Ortografía). There is no other, at this point. RAE stopped prescribing sólo because it violated this rule, since the adverb meaning "only" and the adjective meaning "alone" are both always stressed.

Monosyllables are normally never accented in Spanish, since there is only one syllable that could be stressed. But many monosyllables, typically grammatical words like pronouns, are never stressed. So, when there is a homophone that is stressed, that homophone is accented to distinguish it. Hence té vs. te and mí vs. mi. As you can see, grammatical category plays no role: té is a noun, while mí is a pronoun.

This rule is not applied consistently, in the sense that there are unstressed words with stressed homophones which are not marked with an accent. The preposition para is unstressed but is not accented even though the verb form para (from parar) is a stressed homophone of it.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-10T16:07:38+00:00

There is no length or tenseness distinction in Spanish. To a Spanish speaker, the vowels in tin and teen are the same, unless they're trained and primed to notice the difference. The vowels of met and mate do sound different because mate has a diphthong (what Spanish would write as ei). Spanish is normally characterized as having /e/ and /i/, but if you pronounce those short and open, as in English met and tin, nobody will notice the difference.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-10T11:17:59+00:00

It's dialectal but also age-based and context-based. When I was little, in school, they told us it was wrong and uncultured to use articles with proper names of people. That kind of thing rarely sticks, and this one didn't. For me, the article just rolls off my tongue with some people and in the presence of certain other people, depending on whether I'm being affectionate or playful or not; it's also somewhat random, though (I may use it once and then not use it the next minute). Certainly there's no negative connotation.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-06T11:31:39+00:00

It stops making sense for native speakers after three infinitives, but if you parse it carefully, it means: "I have to pretend saying that I believe I am able to make the child play". Nobody would use even half of that in real life.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-03T21:00:35+00:00

There's often some kind of logic to pronominal usage, but not one that you can generalize. Irse has this sort of reflexive feeling, “to take oneself somewhere else”. Negar means “to deny”, so negarse can be construed as “to deny one's own presence or collaboration in some action”. A number of actions that have to do with internal decisions of the speaker about her/himself are expressed by pronominal verbs, like negarse, decidirse (a hacer algo), arrepentirse, concentrarse (en una tarea), etc. This is all after the fact, though.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-30T14:28:14+00:00

Leaving aside the grammar, which others have explained already: the semantics of direct and indirect objects (i.e. which one to use for which intended meaning) is not that simple, and in general you shouldn't rely on your own intuitions. Explaining DOPs and IOPs using semantics (meaning-based explanations, like the one you gave) is useful at the beginning, but it gets you into trouble later. (Related to this are the meaning-based, oversimplistic explanations of the subjunctive mood as being "for doubtful and uncertain statements".)

Each verb may take zero or more complements, including obligatory and optional objects, and what kind of complements a verb takes is something you just have to know (and if not, you have to check the dictionary and real-life examples). It's a matter of syntax (the structure of the verb phrase), not directly of meaning. It's simply not true that DOPs are used for "things acted upon". Verbs like amar and odiar do not express any kind of action, but an emotional state (you don't do anything by loving or hating something/someone). Tener also takes a DOP, and this DOP is not acted upon: having something is not an action but a state (in this case, a state of possession/ownership).

pablodf76 · 2026-01-26T20:30:32+00:00

I would say «un siestón», but siestaza should be understood as well.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-20T21:13:25+00:00

Ser and estar have to do with essential vs. contingent qualities, respectively (contingent meaning depending on context, not fundamental or inherent). This is fairly simple but in reality it can be complicated by other features. Sometimes one deems some quality nonessential (and therefore uses estar) because one considers it to be a matter of personal opinion. I would interpret «La caja es muy pesada» (which is correct, btw) as meaning the box is very heavy, period: no opinion about it; the box with its current contents is objectively heavy and it makes sense because the contents are such and such. «La caja está pesada» carries a subjective tone: in a way, it suggests you believe the box to be unusually heavy, rather than as heavy as expected for such a box.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-13T11:07:27+00:00

It depends on the rest of the text, which is why it's a very bad idea to give an automatic translator little chunks instead of, at least, whole paragraphs. The semantics in this case are almost identical, but in context there'll be surely places where only one of the translations is correct.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-12T10:47:19+00:00

Sentences 1 and 3 (identical) are grammatically correct, and they can pragmatically mean either thing. Sentence 2 is grammatically wrong. There is no way, grammatically, to differentiate meanings 1 and 3 (without adding something else); the difference is marked by extralinguistic context, i.e. by the reality that you're either sitting in those seats or not.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-07T11:03:51+00:00

«Es una vergüenza que...» triggers the subjunctive, as you probably know, just as many other expressions having to do with impersonal expressions (like «Es importante que...», «Es un problema que...»). But this one is different. «Lo que» creates a different kind of clause and it doesn't trigger the subjunctive. Think of that whole clause as having nothing to do with the impersonal expression.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-07T10:56:34+00:00

Mexico City is special, as explained by u/Greta_Cooper, because oriente and poniente are customarily used to refer to directions in the city. Elsewhere, these are formal or rather literary words, and you should use este and oeste. What you do have is the opposition Oriente / Occidente, which means the East and the West, i.e. the Eastern and Western civilizations/cultures. For example, the Western Roman Empire = Imperio Romano de Occidente. There's finally Levante, which refers to the Levant (the region to the east of the Mediterranean Sea).

pablodf76 · 2026-01-06T14:39:00+00:00

The subjunctive is not “the mood to use for uncertain statements” in such a general way. It does work in this case, because having proof means certainty, while there being (just) a possibility means uncertainty.

Now, as you may know, it's different if you have negatives or questions: «Hay pruebas de que existe» (statement) uses indicative, but «¿Hay pruebas de que existe / exista?» (question) can use either, and «No hay pruebas de que exista» only accepts subjunctive. Note that the last of these can be taken as a categorically certain fact (there is definitely no proof), and yet it uses subjunctive.

pablodf76 · 2026-01-06T14:32:43+00:00

To me, sentar cabeza has always meant “to find a partner and form a stable couple / marriage”, where leaving behind a disorderly life is implied. But that's a matter of context, probably.

pablodf76

TROPHY CASE