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Spanish: A wolf in sheep’s clothing | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| XGargoyle Bilingual Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 5956 days ago 42 posts - 93 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, EnglishB2 Studies: GermanA2, Japanese, Russian | Message 9 of 73 07 June 2010 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Konjunktiv II in German works almost in the same way as past subjunctive in Spanish. Some uses of the Konjunktiv I apply the same in Spanish subjunctive. From a concept level, a German speaker won't find many difficulties to understand the use of the Spanish subjunctive. It's been about 20 years since I learned French, but I believe there were 4 tenses for the subjunctive (although 2 were rarely used) and Italian has 4 tenses as well, just like Spanish (present, perfect, imperfect and pluperfect). Someone more knowledgeable on these languages, please correct me. Spanish has also 2 additional tenses for the future subjunctive, but these have fallen completely into disuse. A highly educated Spaniard would hardly (or never) use the future subjunctive, unless he's a lawyer or a writer. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5345 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 10 of 73 07 June 2010 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Very good point. The use of "populación" when you mean población would indeed be mistaken, as it is a verb and not a noun. I also remember hearing an Hispanic political commentator on CNN repeatedly using the word "unión" when he meant sindicato. That's why I loath North American Spanish - the coarsening and amputation of Spanish to make it fit English patterns and vocabulary, attempting as you say to make it a word-for-word translation of the latter, depriving Spanish of its freshness, individuality, character and genius. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6042 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 11 of 73 07 June 2010 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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We will have to agree to disagree. German speakers have just as much trouble understanding the Spanish subjunctive as English speakers.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 12 of 73 07 June 2010 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Herd, not herds, and it's more 'morally bad' than 'disgusting', which is a somewhat odd concept here. It actually is pretty easy: fi-, ge-, -et, -ar, and -ej are regular affixes which you can combine with any root or each other. Combinations with lots of them may look a little daunting at first, but it only takes a few days to get the hang of it. That just leaves 'bov' - a perfectly normal root word, though one that needs to be learned - and 'o', the normal and regular noun ending. Being able to build words like this is one of the things which makes Esperanto easy: for a small amount of initial difficulty while learning it, you can suddenly express a huge amount of concepts with very few roots. Edited by Volte on 07 June 2010 at 6:43pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 13 of 73 07 June 2010 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The French students ran into trouble when it came to those tenses that are hardly used outside of formal written French. Although there are similarities between the indicative and subjunctive moods in Spanish and German, they are not used in exactly the same way. If you try to map the 6 or so tenses in German with the 16 or so tenses in Spanish, you won't always find the perfect match, and to complicate things further, you have the widespread use of modal auxiliaries in Germanic languages. Edited by tractor on 08 June 2010 at 12:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7103 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 14 of 73 07 June 2010 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm sorry but you're going to have to enlighten me on this... under what circumstances is populación a verb? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Luk Triglot Groupie Argentina Joined 5335 days ago 91 posts - 127 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: Italian, German, Mandarin, Greek | Message 15 of 73 07 June 2010 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Spanish is easy up until intermediate, I think. That part might be easy. Mastering its nuences is another thing.
The problem with the irregularity of verbs can be solved by practice. Natives don't have that problem because we have already assimilated a lot of verb forms, we don't think about it, we just know it. I believe that the major difficulty with Spanish is its moods of speech and some equivalences between them (some of them weird and difficulty to apply). That is hard for a native. Countless errors I find in newspapers or even books about this matter. I just can't image what happens in the mind of a foreign student. It's not impossible, it's just hard. Having said that I know people from others countries that learn it very fast. Living in a Spanish speaking country is key here. The French learn it pretty fast, and I also met Americans who could speak it right the way (not perfect of course). That is what I'm saying, the first fase of learning is not hard, another thing is writing correctly. Edited by Luk on 07 June 2010 at 11:07pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5345 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 16 of 73 08 June 2010 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Strictly speaking it is a verbal noun. Their function in a sentence is different and so one cannot be substituted for the other. Example: La populación de América por parte de los europeos trajo graves consecuencias para la población indígena. Replace población with populación and vice versa, and the result is nonsense. Hence the danger of simply forcing one language into another. 10 persons have voted this message useful |
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