Crazy people are everywhere. At work. At school. At home. They, in fact, seem to make up the majority of the population and, most certainly, are the most common type of individual that you or I will meet on a daily basis. This is why most languages have at least a dozen expressions for the […]
Category: Temas especiales
“To Become” in Spanish
There are some verbs that don’t translate very neatly between English and Spanish. The verb “become” is one such example, as it has six equivalents in Spanish and they’re not all interchangeable. Before you become (no pun intended) panicked, there are fairly simple rules regarding the use of each of these translations and, with a […]
Alternativas para “coger”
¡Hola! If you’ve been learning Spanish for some time, you’ve probably discovered that the dictionary isn’t always reliable when it comes to translating what you want to say. For years, I used the word felpudo to describe a door mat, simply because it was the only translation my dictionary gave for the word. It wasn’t […]
El misterio tras el imperfecto vs el pretérito
¡Hola! I figured that since I’ve been so sporadic about posting lately (por mi trabajo), I’d offer something a bit more in-depth which I hope will dispel más dudas about this fun but crazy thing called Spanish grammar. Today I want to focus on the difference between the pretérito and the imperfecto, a tricky subject […]
Fun with “falsos amigos”
After four posts on the subjective (and all the collateral cerebral damage caused by writing them), I thought I’d give us a break and focus on something a un poco más ligero. Not to neglect this all-important subject, but there are tons of other aspectos of the language worth talking about. I have in my […]
El subjuntivo y el futuro
¡Feliz año nuevo! Last post, we explored some of the ethereal purposes of the Spanish subjunctive. We fairly well established that it is used whenever the speaker will not or cannot commit to a fact. Whenever doubt, desire, uncertainty or the imposition of one’s will over another come into play, the subjunctive appears. Until now, […]
El subjuntivo – la continuación
Last week, we entered the nebulous world of the subjunctive and I attempted to make sense of its somewhat subjective purpose. Today I want to delve deeper. We’ll look at sentences which I call bi-subjunctual (that’s not a real word, BTW). That is, sentences which can take either the subjunctive or the indicative and which […]
El subjuntivo – “¡qué miedo!”
Hola y bienvenidos nuevamente a JT’s Spanish. I’ve had several requests to go deeper into certain grammatical concepts that are the bane of our angloparlante existence and today, I’m going to try and darles gusto by exploring the most confusing of all grammatical aspects in Spanish: the “subjunctive” (I wanted to write this in some […]
Gástarselas, arreglárselas, vérselas, etc.
Today we’ll explore a number of colloquial expressions which, to some degree, transcend grammatical comprehension. Rather than over-analyze them, I’ll ask you to keep an open mind and simply accept these terms as part of the language. If you commit them to memory, they’ll become great allies in your efforts at self-expression. With a small […]
Imperfect Subjunctive vs Imperfect Indicative
Today I thought I’d take a stab at a concept which took me ages to comprehend and which, I hope, I have finally mastered in conversation. If you’re a beginning student of Spanish, this post may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you have already delved into the black hole which is […]