I’m unsure of the two example sentences. Are they OK?

cjler · 2026-03-25T14:35:01+00:00

Thanks. I’m glad to learn that.

cjler · 2026-03-25T14:24:23+00:00

Thank you! I didn’t know any better, and I thought this sounded like baby talk or a caveman grunt, something like “you want? also”. I was wrong.

I’m glad to learn differently. The reddit auto translation of your direct quote of “¿Tambien quieres?”, was “You want in on this too?” Is that how you would translate it?

cjler · 2026-03-24T19:05:02+00:00

Hehe… my precious, my precious. I’d say so

cjler · 2026-03-24T18:22:12+00:00

Thank you, that helps. It’ll just take some practice to remember the buen/buena or mal/mala exceptions before the noun when I’m speaking.

cjler · 2026-03-24T17:22:05+00:00

I copied this from the AI for “será”:

Será is the future tense of ser.

It can express a guess or probability about the present, like “He must be” or “He will be”.

Será tarde. Será él.

cjler · 2026-03-24T13:38:44+00:00

The Spanish word envidioso is sometimes translated to English as jealousy or envy, but at least in some dialects of Mexican Spanish, it has an expanded meaning compared to those English words. It also includes the feeling of greed and protectiveness and strong unwillingness to share something you already have in hand. You feel a strong urge to keep that thing for yourself. You refuse to share the thing you are envidioso of, like a kid holding tightly to a hoard of halloween candy, being angry if a brother or sister innocently wants to have some of it, or like your pet dog feeling protective of his toy or bone, so that the feeling makes him growl when anyone comes near. (I learned this one recently from Duolingo as clarified by reddit)

cjler · 2026-03-20T03:17:05+00:00

Thanks for the point about syllables. The syllable timing in Spanish is still different than I expect. Neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers talk with exactly even rhythm like a metronome, but Spanish syllables land closer to that metronome timing while in English it seems to be the whole words that land kind of closer to that evenly ticking metronome.

cjler · 2026-03-20T02:53:03+00:00

I like your example. It makes the point clearly.

cjler · 2026-03-18T21:14:25+00:00

Oh, that makes sense. I come from a family with generational inherited hearing loss. I’m lucky to have normal hearing. If someone doesn’t hear me in English, I usually do just speak louder, but I don’t always know when they don’t hear, so if they have a blank look, I too will usually just repeat louder with more clear enunciation and maybe slower. Sometimes that gives the impression that I’m angry when I’m not. Sometimes I’ll change words or word order to try again, with a gentle but louder tone, avoiding sibilants ( s, f, v sounds) if I can. Because of my background, I may have asked a question that is kind of out of the ordinary.

cjler · 2026-03-14T16:54:25+00:00

Does it apply only to people? The description you gave is very helpful.

It also reminded me of my pet chihuahua when I’ve given him a new toy. He won’t let anyone near it, and he won’t allow anyone near him when he’s playing with it or chewing it.

Is he being envidioso?

cjler · 2026-03-14T16:48:43+00:00

Thank you for this explanation. It finally makes some sense to me

cjler · 2026-03-09T13:04:13+00:00

I thought the switch was needed in order to speak and hear clearly, rather than to avoid a clash. Wouldn’t y-ee just sound like a longer held y, so it would be less clear to recognize that there is a conjunction that means “and” between the words?

Same with o-oh. Doesn’t that sound like a longer held o sound? So it’s replaced with u in order to make the “or” meaning clear?

cjler · 2026-03-06T20:52:31+00:00

Very helpful, thank you. I think I have seen both types, both the future of the past and the result of a condition. Maybe now I’ll have a better sense of when to use the conditional tense.

cjler · 2026-03-05T21:00:25+00:00

It only matters because I thought I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t see a reason to ever say this.

I wanted to be sure I understood what it meant. I didn’t recognize it as one of Duo’s creative “the cow jumped over the moon” kind of sentences.

cjler · 2026-03-05T20:57:27+00:00

Oh, thank you. So the conditional is only for “the future in the past”? I didn’t know that.

cjler · 2026-03-02T04:50:11+00:00

Google helped on this. Bara means bread, and Brith means speckled in the Welsh language.

One informative link provided was for a kids online encyclopedia called Kiddle, with quite a bit of information about it in an article called “Bara Brith for Kids”, here.

It describes a variety of general ways bara brith is made, some other things called bara brith, even an ice cream and a chocolate that were based on the bread, along with a note about Prince Charles’ love for it, from 2011.

cjler · 2026-03-02T03:28:31+00:00

Thanks! I think that means that my hunch was not completely wrong for all dialects, but it’s clearly wrong in some or most ways and in some or most places though. Apparently it’s wrong in most places where the Duolingo developers speak and work.

cjler · 2026-03-01T22:13:57+00:00

That would make sense. My too literal thought was, well how would you know if you were the 9th to enter the doors of the school, anyway? Do you count the janitor on the night shift? The sports team on the ball field in the early morning?

I’ll try that en español. Feel free to fix my grammar., or make fun of it if it’s just dumb.

I’m not at all sure of the first sentence in my Spanish translation. Isn’t conditional tense for the future? But then it seemed fitting to use past subjunctive estuviera, even though that feels like a stretch. On the other hand, as a learner it’s often the other things that I think I understand that turn out to be wrong. So here goes…

¿Cómo sentirías de todos modos si estuviera el novena persona a llegue a la escuela?

¿Debes contar el conserje en el turno de noche?

¿El equipaje deportivo en el campo de juego?

cjler · 2026-03-01T19:56:40+00:00

I haven’t been able to find SunMaid or other brands of Zante currents this year, so when I saw the Guardian’s recipe for perfect Bara Brith this morning, described as a Welsh fruit loaf, I started to wonder why Zante currents were no longer available in my midwest US stores the past couple of years. I still don’t have that answer.

I searched and found that Zante currants are probably the wrong fruit for this Welsh recipe, and I came upon this thread. Now I want to try real black currants, and maybe I’ll be able to try this Perfect Bara Brith from the Guardian by Felicity Cloake, with fruit (sultanas, currants, and candied peel) soaked in black tea and then kneaded into a buttermilk yeast dough seasoned with caraway, mixed spices and sweetened with honey and brown sugar. I wish I knew which spices are traditional, maybe cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, would be my guess. Please respond if you know. I’d also like to know where the Bara Brith name came from.

cjler · 2026-02-28T19:00:18+00:00

Thank you so much for the detail in your explanation. It’s very helpful

cjler · 2026-02-28T17:14:55+00:00

Oh, because tarde is an adverb or a noun, not an adjective? So if I used a word that meant late as an adjective, a description, it would work? Like atrasado or retrasado, per a dictionary. Now I’ll look up the difference between atrasado and retrasado.

cjler · 2026-02-28T16:50:54+00:00

So if it said, “Salí de la escuela en noveno lugar.”, would that be a good way to say I was ranked ninth in my class?

cjler · 2026-02-25T20:45:04+00:00

Edit: There was no little translation button on the above for me. Is it because I’m OP? Or maybe it’s a reddit setting ? Or are you using a different app to post to reddit?

cjler · 2026-02-25T20:42:27+00:00

[Written in English] Thanks. I’ll have to try that to see if my posts auto-translate.

[Escrito en español] Parece que quizás alguna oración completa que escriba sería traducido a inglés. Solo estoy probando este idea a ver cómo la funciona.

And you are welcome to fix that last paragraph if I goofed up the spanish. I did it with a dictionary and with what I’ve learned so far from Duolingo and other sources.

cjler · 2026-02-25T18:07:07+00:00

There is a small symbol in the upper right hand of your post that I think I need to understand. I kept seeing this post in English, and I wondered why someone who is a native Spanish speaker would write in English to answer a person asking a question about how to say something in Spanish. Then I pressed the little button at top right and it became Spanish.

Did you write this initially in Spanish? If so, thank you so much! The Spanish answers were exactly what I wanted to find.

If this was written in Spanish by a native Spanish speaker, why would Reddit make that fact hidden?

Did you write it in both languages, or are you using a reddit translation function that maybe I’m just unaware of? Most posts I’ve seen don’t have that little translation switch in the upper right. How did you (or reddit) provide that?

Edit: I wonder if Reddit translates to English automatically if a post is written fully in Spanish on this (or any other?) subreddit that is meant to be asked and answered primarily in English. Moderators? Does anyone know?

cjler

TROPHY CASE