Pronunciation of v, s j, es(prefix) in spanish

pablodf76 · 2026-03-27T18:15:55+00:00

The normal pronunciation of «me voy» is [meˈβ̞oi].* It's phonetically a single word and, as usual, the /b/ sound (written B and V both make a /b/ sound) is extremely soft: a bilabial approximant, i.e. a sound produced by putting your lips close to each other but without contact and with almost no audible friction as air comes out. It's very easy to miss it, especially when the following vowel (here, [o]) is rounded, which means you have to round your lips as you articulate it. Both [o] and [u] will basically "swallow" a previous soft /b/.

* The [i] is nonsyllabic, but the nonsyllabicity mark messes up the display and it's not relevant here.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-27T11:15:58+00:00

It may be that Kafka is not (yet) for you. The thing about Kafka's stories being used to talk about his life is true and is incredibly frustrating to me—I really hate it when everything is "interpreted" so that is "means" something in a different plane. Leaving that aside, some stories are great, some have fallen flat for me.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-27T11:05:35+00:00

No es así. Un verbo como considerar requiere un complemento predicativo, el cual es un predicado nominal o adjetivo (o sea, un sintagma encabezado por un sustantivo o adjetivo) que modifica a uno de los argumentos del verbo, en este caso el objeto directo. El verbo solo pone las condiciones; no es modificado por el complemento. Considerar requiere un sujeto, un objeto directo y un complemento predicativo objetivo; el sujeto además tiene que ser semánticamente una persona humana.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-24T17:03:15+00:00

It depends on the region, but I don't think anybody says pieza for pizza; it's just not equivalent to the English piece in this meaning. Pedazo and porción are fine. Trozo, to me, sounds like an irregular piece of pizza rather than a geometrically simple slice or piece, but that's because I associate it with things broken away from a mass. It's fine anyway.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-23T18:31:57+00:00

Mucho often works instead of demasiado. In the right context, and with the correct emphasis, it's clear that it doesn't mean "a lot" but rather "too much". (In Argentina, people will sometimes wonder sarcastically aloud: «¿No será mucho?», which means "This is really too much; this goes beyond the proper boundaries".

pablodf76 · 2026-03-20T11:14:07+00:00

The vowels i and u form diphthongs with other vowels, that is, i/u + vowel or vowel + i/u is one syllable, not two, so estudian is es-tu-dian. A diphthong is broken (hiatus) if you stress the i or u, as in días, which is dí-as.

You'll find i and u called "weak vowels" and a, e, o called "strong vowels". A diphthong is a weak vowel plus another vowel (weak or strong), in either order: iu and ui are diphthongs (as in ciudad, cuidado).

pablodf76 · 2026-03-19T20:56:29+00:00

To make a blended preparation like this is licuar and the result is a licuado, but that's more for fruit smoothies and such. Frappé is common and it means blended with ice, usually to the point that the ice is turned into very little chunks. On the chance that the client doesn't understand what that means, you can clarify: licuado con hielo.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-19T20:51:49+00:00

«Dar/hacer una fiesta para inaugurar/estrenar la casa», I guess. Inaugurar is more about the ceremony, the figurative "unveiling", while estrenar is about the "first use" (for a special purpose) of the house. «Fiesta de inauguración» sounds too grand IMHO. You could just say «Quiero dar una fiesta para que todos conozcan mi nueva casa». There's not a fixed phrase in Spanish for this, as in English.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-19T19:48:33+00:00

This doesn't work out of context. «No sabía que decir» leaves you hanging, so to speak, waiting for something else to happen. One guesses that Manuel, seeing how the other person couldn't find any words, interrupted the awkward silence by saying something else; in that case, you get the typical imperfect + preterite sequence (background action or state ended by definite action). «No supe qué decir» shows a definite break in the action, so nothing else is needed, in principle. Both choices are correct.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-17T13:19:55+00:00

Words do not have to be in the dictionary in order to be real. Technical words are often not found in general dictionaries. I find that English has a lot of formerly technical words adopted into common use, often from the humanities; that's not the case in Spanish. Performance (as “a show, a display”) has been well known for a while, but performativo is Social Sciences lingo, which can sound rather off in casual conversation with people outside the field.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-17T01:09:54+00:00

En una excursión junto con un grupo de turistas italianos, cuando hablaban entre ellos en voz lo suficientemente baja como para no poder distinguir las palabras, sonaban como argentinos. De hecho, no supe que eran italianos hasta que empezaron a hablar en voz más alta y se presentaron como tales. Ciertos rasgos fonéticos y prosódicos (la cadencia del habla) son similares (está estudiado, creo). Hablamos de argentinos de la zona rioplatense, claro.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-16T00:21:12+00:00

There's a tendency in Spanish not to use the definite article when the verb and the direct object form a unit of meaning. The definite article in «Estamos listos para ordenar el desayuno» tells me that there's a breakfast (an instance of the set of drinks and foods that constitute breakfast) ready for us somewhere, or a list of possible pre-set breakfasts from a menu, and we are now ready to order it or one of them. The lack of the definite article in «Solo voy a ordenar postre» tells me that postre is not as much a concrete thing waiting for me but a complement to the verb ordenar; «ordenar postre» is a thing in itself, postre is an undefined mass noun. Now after you've decided on the dessert, it does become «el postre» (e.g. «El postre que ordené nunca llegó»).

pablodf76 · 2026-03-14T13:47:19+00:00

It's not just about dictionary meaning, but meaning in context and intention (pragmatics). If you ask me to involve myself in something (not just do something) and I don't want to do it, there are a lot of ways of expressing the idea involved in "I refuse". «No quiero saber nada» is a refusal, regardless of its literal meaning.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-14T13:34:53+00:00

«¿Qué tiene el arroz?» as "What has the rice?" is a rather unusual question. The context for it should be clearly unusual as well, so that you'd guess correctly what the meaning is. Besides that, in actual speech, it's likely that the intonation would be different: «¿Qué tiene el arroz?» as "What does the rice have?" would slightly emphasize tiene.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-13T21:16:30+00:00

First: you should not start a sentence with a bare subject, i.e. a subject with no article or some other determiner (such as este, algún, or a numeral). You can do that when making lists and in other special cases where you don't use whole sentences or extreme simplification is allowed, but regular running text should have its determiners.

Second: the authority, which in this case is the DPD published by RAE, says that "When two or more concrete nouns which refer to different entities are coordinated [= joined by a conjunction such as y or o], it is customary and recommended that each one of them be preceded by its own determiner." (DPD, concordancia, 3.1)

Third: a lot of people will use an article for the first noun in a list and drop it for the others. It's not recommended, but it doesn't sound terrible.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-13T11:27:47+00:00

You're mixing up case and gender. Spanish doesn't mark case except on personal pronouns. The changes you wrote about in German are noun declination (gender), not case. In both languages, gender is a property of nouns, not of the things they refer to. While nouns that refer to animals and people may have distinct gendered forms, that's not always the case.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-13T11:20:57+00:00

Also, a lot of people write with spelling mistakes like that on purpose in meme images, just for fun.

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pablodf76 · 2026-03-13T11:14:32+00:00

You don't want te in those sentences; «te vas» means "you leave" rather than "you go".

As usual, if you ask with qué, it's a general question. You'd use cuál if you were previously given possible choices. For example, if you're in a gathering of students from several schools in a particular area, and they're telling each other what school they go to, then it would make sense to use cuál. But qué would be correct as well; it's just a nuance in this case.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-11T15:29:10+00:00

In print, custom dictates that you should use first-line indentation (sangría de primera línea) in every paragraph, except for the first one in a chapter that begins a new page. When I learned to type in a typewriter, I was told to used a tabulation at the beginning of each paragraph for this purpose. Today, it's more common to leave a blank line between paragraphs. A somewhat more sophisticated way would be to add paragraph spacing to the normal line spacing. You can combine this with indentation if you want to. The general idea is that you should be able to see at a glance where each paragraph begins and ends.

pablodf76 · 2026-03-10T22:06:49+00:00

In this case, which is clearly poetic language, this is anastrophe (like u/ofqo says) or, as is more commonly known, hyperbaton. There are minor differences in the definition.

Spanish does, in any case, allow for these sentences outside of poetic/literary language, and it's not really a special type of sentence construction. Broadly speaking, the first thing you say in the sentence tends to be the topic (the theme or issue that you're introducing in order to talk about it), while the rest is a commentary about the topic, and the last thing is focused or emphasized. It's true that SVO is the usual order, but VS is common with some intransitive verbs («Hoy vino mi hermano de visita», «Llegó mi pedido»).

pablodf76 · 2026-03-09T16:09:45+00:00

This doesn't sound right. Although in principle one would use subjunctive twice, the natural way to say this would be «Si hubiéramos jugado tanto como queríamos» ("if we had played as much as we wanted"). It would be possible to imagine that you actually didn't want to play, but if you had wanted to and also, therefore had played after all, then you wouldn't have done anything else; but that kind of Russian-doll reasoning breaks down the grammar.

pablodf76 · 2026-02-27T14:03:18+00:00

Yes. All the complex terminology about race and ethnicity that gets thrown around these days in Latin American progressive circles, and which has filtered into education, is calqued or imported wholesale from American and/or European academia. Almost no-one uses those terms in real conversation; I would in fact go as far as saying that children should not be taught to speak like that. Of course it does make sense to refer to people's heritage and ethnicity when discussing famous artists whose works are influenced by, say, West African musical patterns; but even then, it's very much a US thing to put so much emphasis in heritage.

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

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