sab15 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5217 days ago 39 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Dutch, Portuguese
| Message 1 of 23 16 January 2012 at 5:11pm | IP Logged |
Does one say:
Estoy mirando la television ahora or
Estoy viendo la television ahora
and
Estoy mirando una pelicula ahora or
Estoy viendo una pelicula ahora
Gracias,
Steven
Edited by sab15 on 16 January 2012 at 5:12pm
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5134 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 2 of 23 16 January 2012 at 5:48pm | IP Logged |
You'll hear both, honestly, and both are readily understood.
In both Mexico and Spain, "ver" seems to be the preferred word, at least in my experience.
R.
==
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mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5230 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese
| Message 3 of 23 16 January 2012 at 7:23pm | IP Logged |
In Spanish Spanish
"Mirar la televisión" would very likely imply watching the TV set, not the program being aired.
OTOH "Ver la televisión" would refer to regular "TV watching".
You wouldn't say "mirar una/la película", but rather "ver una/la película".
Without any other context, other uses would sound weird to me.
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caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4866 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish
| Message 4 of 23 17 January 2012 at 12:52pm | IP Logged |
I agree with the above explanations.
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fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4869 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 5 of 23 17 January 2012 at 5:09pm | IP Logged |
I've only been studying Spanish about a year but I read a lot of novels in Spanish and watch a lot of movies and TV and my first reaction is that I think I've only ever heard "ver" in reference to TV and movies. "Mirar una película" sounds a little peculiar to me for some reason. Probably because I don't think I've ever heard it.
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nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5419 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean
| Message 6 of 23 17 January 2012 at 5:42pm | IP Logged |
This isn't specifically limited to your question (which has been answered), but a good technique for resolving questions like this is to simply run a Google search on different phrases, and see what's most commonly used.
For example, to use mrwarper's infinitive phrases, "Mirar la televisión" yields 581,000 results, while "Ver la televisión" yields 8,120,000 results. This, of course, corresponds to the answers you've received in this thread.
It's a very useful method for identifying common usage, even when multiple combinations may be "technically" correct.
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mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5230 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese
| Message 7 of 23 17 January 2012 at 6:04pm | IP Logged |
It's a good technique that I use myself indeed.
Interestingly enough, ~600000 is a hell of a lot of results. This suggests "mirar la televisión" is a real idiomatic usage in the 'usual' sense somewhere else, presumably in a relatively small area of the Spanish-speaking world (I don't know where because I haven't heard it in that sense).
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stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5836 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin
| Message 8 of 23 17 January 2012 at 6:57pm | IP Logged |
mrwarper wrote:
It's a good technique that I use myself indeed.
Interestingly enough, ~600000 is a hell of a lot of results. This suggests "mirar la televisión" is a real idiomatic usage in the 'usual' sense somewhere else, presumably in a relatively small area of the Spanish-speaking world (I don't know where because I haven't heard it in that sense). |
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Maybe there are 600000 students of Spanish out there who haven't read this post. :)
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