Learning the Spanish Language — Project Day 31

Verbs with implicit prepositions

Interestingly, the exercises offered two translations for 'to cross out' — 'borrar' and 'tachar'. But only suggested 'borrar' in the solution for 'he crosses out his mistakes'. Google Translate prefers 'tachar' and translates 'borrar' as 'to delete'.

Although I never deeply rely on them, I like Google's translations for nouns and idioms, because they usually offer frequency data. Which I appreciate, notwithstanding my previous comments about the DfE's silly 'vocabularly book' approach to language learning.

Articles, Prepositions and Pronouns

As usual, the implicit preposition exercises threw up unrelated, or only indirectly related, learning points. For example, I notice that Spaniards 'escuchan la música clásica', 'deben colgar sus abrigos', but 'agredecen todo'.

I need to figure out why classical music needs the definite article. The requirement for the possessive pronoun with 'their coats' and the absence of an article or preposition with 'everything' are fairly obvious.

Along similar lines — the suggested solution for translating "The mail carrier always steps on my roses" is "El cartero siempre pisa las rosas". I had "mis rosas".

I presume I was wrong, but why? Are roses some sort of abstract thing that can never be possessed? Or is it that 'siempre' removes all potential variability from the word form for those roses? Like todos.

Accents

I should pay more attention to accents on letters.

I don't really care much about them, personally. Because they're largely pronunciation indicators in Spanish — they rarely alter meanings, like they do in French or Italian. And I don't need those indicators, because I listen to Spanish all day long.

So, for example, I constantly hear the difference between 'esta casa' and 'está allí'. But the accents might help other people reading this blog — if anyone else actually did :-)

The Personal 'a'

Used when a verb's direct object is a specific person — the a follows the verb and precedes the person-object.

A sign that people are more important than things. And it's unique to Spanish — there's no English translation.

Usage:

Never with 'ser', 'tener', or 'hay'
Never when the direct object is an unspecified person
Used for personal pets — specific to you
Never for other animals
The 'a' goes before the interrogative word in questions
In a sequence of direct objects — an 'a' goes before each of them
'a el' contracts to 'al'

I wasn't very happy with my performance on these written exercises. I tripped up on 3 of the trickier ones:

Didn't put 'a' before 'quien?'
Didn't contract 'a el' to 'al' — bad, would have automatically spoken it (ITA)
Didn't put 'a' before second direct object

Lesson — this is a wrinkle I need to come back to and iron out.

Learning Tasks Checklist

Task	M	T	W
Word/phrase aural+oral	✓	✓	✓
Sentence aural+oral	✓	✓	✕
Socratic aural+oral	✓	✓	✕
Verb exercises	✓	✓	✕
Pronoun exercises	✓	✓	✕
Preposition exercises	✓	✓	✓
Reading	✓	✓	✕
Physical exercise	✕	✕	✕
Non-subbed video	✓	✕	✓
Subbed video	✓	✕	✓
Research lang. learning	✕	✕	✓
List 'issues'	✓	✓	✕
Prepare materials	✓	✓	✓