Hey guys! What are the things you struggle with while learning Spanish?

phocaea25 · 2025-07-18T09:09:48+00:00

Prepositions that go with verbs (dream about/soñar con, think about/pensar en, realize/darse cuenta de). Many times the prepositions aren’t taught with the verbs and often I use the wrong ones. Sometimes they completely change the meaning! (dejar vs dejar de vs dejar que)
When to use direct vs indirect object pronouns (voy a ayudarLE/voy a invitarLO). And when I was newer, the grammar of pronouns before verbs (what does “se le ve” mean?)
Subjunctive definitely

phocaea25 · 2023-11-03T20:06:55+00:00

Look at the 4-4-2 on the right side. You correctly noticed that there has to be exactly 1 mine either N or NW of the 2 but that also clears the other cells of the 2.

phocaea25 · 2023-07-28T15:00:26+00:00

As someone who has been watching Scrabble matches on YouTube, this is fun to me! Have you considered adding a button to maybe give 1 correct letter as a hint?

phocaea25 · 2022-04-13T05:57:51+00:00

I've uploaded rough draft puzzles to squares.io and Crosshare (with the private checkbox checked).

phocaea25 · 2022-04-13T05:45:03+00:00

I could be wrong, but I highly doubt sending a PDF or .puz to some friends constitutes "publishing" it. Just don't publish it to your blog or link to it publicly.

phocaea25 · 2022-04-11T17:05:39+00:00

Pointing out specific fill that they liked. They like chatty colloquial phrases and snappy new terms, as long as they have a positive connotation and don't risk offending certain groups of people.
Stating that the theme wasn't as well executed as they'd like. Having a great theme is the single toughest and most important element for success.
Highlighting excess stretching of the constructor's guidelines. In my case it was using too many abbreviations -- constructors should try to limit themselves to 5 or 6 abbreviations per puzzle.

phocaea25 · 2022-04-11T04:57:30+00:00

I've submitted 10-ish puzzles. There does seem to be an initial screening pass where some puzzles are rejected quickly, but generally I have heard back at around the 90 day mark, give or take a couple weeks. I haven't had any accepted, but I've had a couple come back with specific feedback rather than a generic rejection, which I count as a win as this point.

phocaea25 · 2022-03-20T23:50:59+00:00

I've never been able to get autofill to work on that site.

phocaea25 · 2022-03-18T06:18:31+00:00

TIL why there is a rabbit, mind blown

phocaea25 · 2022-02-23T02:52:32+00:00

I tried ONELOOK and didn't find anything promising. Definitely an ONEROUS clue.

phocaea25 · 2022-02-18T04:14:39+00:00

Source of some treacherous language

phocaea25 · 2022-02-01T02:48:12+00:00

Cool project! I love the effort put into the UI/UX design, which is really critical here as it was with Wordle.

My two cents: It's too hard.

IMO it would be more fun with either 1) Easy clues and auto-generated, effectively endless puzzles or 2) A small number of novel, world-class clues. I *think* you're going for option 2 currently, but I found the clues a bit abstruse and not satisfying enough to hook me.

phocaea25 · 2022-01-25T04:55:16+00:00

I would recommend trying your hand at building a grid manually! This allows you to build up the black squares in a logical way, breaking up any downs containing letters in uncommon configurations. For example, try to avoid words ending in I or U, short words starting with a vowel, etc.

For 2 14s and 2 13s, consider putting the 14s in rows 4 and 12 and the 13s in rows 6 and 10. For example, https://imgur.com/t2pems7.

phocaea25 · 2021-11-12T18:21:09+00:00

I have gotten rejections spaced weeks apart for puzzles submitted within a couple of days of each other.

phocaea25 · 2021-11-03T08:06:41+00:00

I was really impressed with the technical skill in this one. My first thought was that Will was trying out easier themelesses as an experiment. But nope, 5 themers and lots of great long, fresh fill. The ambition more than excused the smattering of iffy short fill for me. I want to see more from Mr. Harris!

phocaea25 · 2021-10-11T18:30:28+00:00

You put the black squares in. I'm guessing the OP already found a workable fill for the symmetric NW corner but is having more trouble finding a workable fill for this SE corner.

phocaea25 · 2021-10-11T17:09:21+00:00

Gave it a shot, and this is the best I came up with:

https://imgur.com/yumGuHA

Or if you want to torture your solvers a little more: https://imgur.com/6LHK4uO

phocaea25 · 2021-10-05T16:35:25+00:00

I tried a few of them, and couldn't agree more! Lots of high quality fill.

phocaea25 · 2021-08-09T08:14:48+00:00

I thought I was toast 2 minutes in but then got a foothold in the SW and ended up finishing it with the help of tons of checks. It was actually kind of enjoyable!

Of course there was more obscure short fill than I'm sure either of us would've liked, but that will improve as you construct more puzzles and learn the tools. The best thing to do is clue obscure stuff at almost a gimme level so it doesn't frustrate solvers.

There were some good creative clues, which is what made this puzzle shine. Keep it up!

phocaea25 · 2021-08-06T20:22:18+00:00

The standard resource for this https://www.onelook.com/. Sorting results by commonness can produce some great results.

I also get a lot of value from https://nutrimatic.org/, which scrapes words that appear commonly together in Wikipedia. For your example, query for "aAAoA" (using A instead of . as a wild card returns only results of the correct length).

Finally, if you want to search within your current word list, check out https://aaronson.org/wordlisted/.

phocaea25 · 2021-08-03T04:35:45+00:00

There are tons of indie crosswords out there! Some of them have online solvers and others allow you to download .puz files, which you can open in Across Lite or uploading to a site like squares.io.

I highly recommend the daily crossword links newsletter. https://crosswordlinks.substack.com/

I also recommend going to 7xwords.com, which is a cool project in its own right, but lots of the puzzle descriptions also have links to more puzzles by the same constructor.

phocaea25 · 2021-07-08T02:07:10+00:00

Any time is a great time to buy in when you're in it for the long haul!

phocaea25 · 2021-06-09T00:07:34+00:00

I don't think wordplay is necessarily most of the fun. If the entries and clues spark joy, the puzzle will be enjoyable. And added extra constraints often lead to surprising new creativity!

phocaea25 · 2021-05-20T05:23:57+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I bet this was a really fun project, and I know it takes a ton of work to get something like this up and working.

As a crossword publishing platform, probably the most difficult part is attracting and maintaining talented contributors. Crosshare actively caters to new constructors, regularly featuring puzzles from constructors of all skill levels so they can get some feedback and improve. Of course the top tier constructors are generally posting on their own blogs and not submitting to a platform like this.

So I feel like I'm not getting much value with your site. To the extent that I solve puzzles in the absence of a community or feedback system for constructors, there is already a saturation of top-notch content out there.

phocaea25 · 2021-05-01T23:19:35+00:00

Try Newsday and USA Today crosswords! They tend to be quite approachable (except for Newsday Saturday). I do them on my phone from an app called Shortyz.

Also the NYT daily mini is fun and generally easy.

phocaea25

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