Last updated on
Saturday, September 4, 2010 1:41 PM EDT
Accidents that almost happened
There is a little difference between accidents that almost happened in English and Spanish, in English we use past tense, in Spanish we use present tense.
(almost, nearly) + accident verb in the past
(casi, por poco) + accident verb in the present
I almost fell
casi me caigo (caer)
I almost hit myself
casi me golpeo (golpearse)
I almost died
por poco me muero
his shirt almost got stained
a él por poco se le mancha la camisa (mancharse)
the plates almost fell on you
por poco se te caen los platos
my glasses nearly broke
casi se me rompen los lentes
you almost broke your leg
casi te rompes la pierna
you almost burned your hand
por poco te quemas la mano
I nearly fell asleep
casi me quedo dormido
Por poco (by little, nearly), and casi (almost) are used in most countries, but in Mexico, people also use ya mero. Ya mero me caigo is the same as casi me caigo.
Remember that many accident verbs are reflexive. romperse, to break (on you), quemarse to burn onself, electrocutarse to electrocute oneself!
Sometimes being bilingual doesn't help. I'm sure neither you nor I can understand the message on this ad. Imposible! I'm missing something. Right before creating this slogan, the person who did it probably had too many Coronas. ¡Ha de haber tomado muchas cervezas!
Más una fría que beer? Whaaaat?, More a cold one than beer?, More a cold one that beer?, More a cold one than cerveza?, More a cold one that cerveza?, or did they forget the 'b' of beber (to drink), and they wrote beer instead? Just like their new TV commercials on Spanish TV, these ads are a little lame.
Definitely, it's much better when they don't say anything.
Some textbooks teach the future, future perfect, or the conditional of probability, to state phrases like:
Llaman por teléfono, ¿quién será? : Somebody is calling. I wonder who is it. Anoche llamaron por teléfono. ¿quién sería? : Last night somebody called. I wonder who it was. ¿Dónde estarán mis llaves? : I wonder were my keys are. ¿quién habrá enviado este paquete? = ¿quién enviaría este paquete? : I wonder who sent this package.
In this last example, the conditional and the future perfect have the same function, they indicate conjecture in the past.
But in Latin America we use another structure to convey probability in the present, Haber de + infinitive (for the present), and haber de haber + past participle (for the past).
Rafael ha de estar en su casa : Rafael is probably at home, Rafael must be at home. Susana ha de estar preocupada : Susan is probably worried. Susan must be worried. Mi vecina ha de haber ido al mercado : My neighbor probably went to the market. Se ve cansado, no ha de haber dormido bien : He looks tired, he probably didn't sleep well. Se han de haber ido temprano : they probably left early. they must have left early.
It's not easy, specially because those are very short words that merge together in spoken form, and there are a couple of silent H that could throw you:
se han de haber ido sounds like /seandeaberido/ = they probably left. You will need to use your parsing skills at full speed.
But you have to know this structure, specially if you travel to Mexico or watch Mexican soap operas. We use these expressions a lot, more than the future of probability, and it's hardly explained in any book.
In Spain, haber de + infinitive is almost like tener que + infinitive, so it's used mostly for obligation.
Mi abuelo ha de estar cerca del mar porque la altitud lo afecta = Mi abuelo tiene que estar cerca del mar porque la altitud lo afecta : my grandfather has to be near the ocean because altitude affects him.
Back to the Mexican usage, we can say haber de haber haber (hay) as in ha de haber habido mucha gente, porque ya se les acabó la comida : there must have been a lot of people, because they ran out of food already.
This is an ad from the Buenos Aires Zoo:
Han de haber sido los canguros : it must have been the kangaroos.
This is a bus shelter right at the main entrance of Columbia University, New York.
The gentleman on top of the pyramid is Javier Aguirre, the coach of the Mexican soccer team.
I don't know why they are adversiting Mexico, but thank you very much. Good luck to the Mexican and the American teams. They both will need it. Argentina and Brazil are always the best soccer teams in the Americas.
It is very difficult to explain how important this monthlong event is for the rest of the world. North Korea and Brazil just played a match this afternoon, for example. Many people don't go to work, or they take their TVs to the office. Children don't go to school if their country's team is playing. Presidents, kings, princes, prime ministers, sheiks, fly to be present at the stadium if their teams are playing a decisive game. The president of Mexico attended the opening ceremony at the stadium in South Africa, for example. TV commercials in all countries just show soccer players or their fans drinking sodas, eating chocolate, driving cars, drinking beer, etc.
Today, they are playing at 32 degrees F. Kind of a surprise. Colder than the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
When you are learning Spanish, you might expect that sentences follow the same word order as in English. Fortunately, most of the time that's the case, but not always. Spanish has a much more flexible word order than English, a trait partially inherited from Latin.
Spoken language, songs, proverbs, or poetry, for example, very often follow a different word order for various reasons. Maybe the speaker wants to emphasize certain word or part of the sentence. Maybe the speaker wants to hint at something. Maybe the songwriter needs to change the word order to make a rhyme. In English, you usually fix this by inserting commas. In Spanish you don't need them, so don't expect commas if we change the usual word order. Let's see this example:
Yo no puedo llevar a tu perro en mi carro.
(I can't take your dog in my car).
We can change this sentence to A tu perro yo no lo puedo llevar en mi carro.
(*Your dog I can't take in my car*)
If you start the sentence with a personal a (the dog is not a person, right?) but the personal a helps differentiate the subject from the object in a sentence. If the person (or dog) is preceded by a personal a, then it cannot be the subject of the sentence. It's an object. In this example, since perro is preceded by a personal a, a Spanish native speaker immediately knows that the dog is not the subject of the sentence. Furthermore, we don't need to explicitly say the subject (yo). A tu perro no lo puedo llevar en mi carro. He emphasizes here that he cannot take your dog in his car, but maybe he could drive your cat, or maybe somebody else's dog, but not yours, maybe because he doesn't like you, or he thinks your dog is vicious, but he has no problem with carrying all other dogs.
Another possible word order for the same sentence: En mi carro no puedo llevar a tu perro.
(*In my car I can't take your dog*)
Here, he emphasizes that he cannot take your dog in his car, but maybe in his SUV he could!
Or maybe he can't carry your dog in his car, but he can walk your dog from it. (mean.)
So, with all these different combinations for
a single sentence, how do we know who or what is the subject? We need to identify the main verb or verbs. In this case puedo llevar. Puedo is the present yo form of the verb poder. We can disregard llevar because it is not conjugated. The main verb is telling us that Yo (I) is the subject.
We can still arrange more valid combinations. En mi carro a tu perro no lo puedo llevar.
(*In my car your dog I can't take*) No puedo a tu perro llevarlo en mi carro. No puedo en mi carro a tu perro llevarlo. Llevar a tu perro en mi carro no puedo. Llevar en mi carro a tu perro no puedo.
(*To take in
my car your dog I cannot*)
The main sentence parts are en mi carro / a tu perro / llevar / (yo) / no puedo.
You can make combinations of them, you may need to insert the direct object pronoun lo in some cases (singular masculine D. O. pronoun for perro). A poet or songwriter could perfectly use any of the above sentences, and a Spanish speaking listener would have no problem understanding them.
You could even move yo around:
Yo llevar en mi carro a tu perro no puedo.
This sounds like he can't do it, but maybe somebody else will, even in this person's car. A sentence like this wouldn't be used on any normal situation. Maybe only a poet or a songwriter would use something like the above example.
Yo no puedo llevar a tu perro en mi carro, pero mi perro sí te puede llevar en su carro.
carro (U.S., Mex, Central America) = coche (Mex, Spain) = auto (Argentina) = automóvil (generic)
(* ----- *) indicates an ungrammatical English sentence.
10 expressions that are not so easy to figure out (5)
Here are 10 common random idioms you may have trouble with if you hear them for the first time:
Expression
Approximate literal translation (what you might think you actually heard)
Explanation
¿qué crees?
what do you believe?
guess what.
cambiar de opinion
to change opinion
to change one's mind, also cambiar de parecer.
de mentiras
of lies
fake, a prop, toy, pistola de mentiras is a toy gun, also pistola de juguete.
echarse a perder
to throw itself to lose
to get spoiled, to rot, to be ruined
estar en pañales
to be in diapers
to be in its infancy (a situation), to be immature
foto movida : salir movido
moved photo : to come out moved
shaky picture : to come out blurred (on a photo)
hacer lo correcto
to do the correct, to make the correct
to do the right thing
hacer puente (Mex)
to make (a) bridge
to take an (usually) unauthorized extra day between two holidays, or a weekend and a holiday. To take a long weekend. El puente de semana santa, the bridge of saint week, is the long weekend of Easter.
ser buena gente
to be good people
to be a nice, kind, and/or good person
ser de confianza
to be of trust, confidence
(work) non union personnel, (personal acquaintance) no special protocol needed with that person, like part of the family
Most expressions apply to all Spanish speaking countries.
Based on the expression hacer puente, can you guess what's the meaning of this sign?
Warning: this article contains a couple of raunchy words.
As you can see in some of the examples below, you have to be very careful when saying some of these words. It's similar to the common pronunciation mistake of Spanish speaking people trying to say beach, but ending up sounding like bitch. Something similar could happen to you in Spanish, so watch out.
N
Ñ
ano
anus
año
year; that's why it's so important to say cumpleaÑos (birthday) correctly!
campana
bell
campaña
campaign
cana
grair hair, white hair
caña
cane, reed
cano
a man with gray/white hair, also a common last name,
caño
pipes, sewage
ceno
from cenar, to dine
ceño
brow, frown
cono
cone
coño
cunt (vulg.), jeez, hell (I must point out that, in Mexico, this word is often used on TV commedy shows to immitate the vocabulary people from Spain and the Caribbean use. In other words, in Mexico, this is not such a bad word, it's just foreign)
If you have ever visited Mexico City, you might have seen El Ángel. It's a traffic circle similar to Columbus Circle in New York. These city fixtures are called glorietas. The Angel was constructed to commemorate the centennial of the Independence of Mexico in 1910. This is how it looked around that time. You can see some vehicles there. On a higher resolution version, it's clear that some of them are trucks, and they don't look quite primitive, so this photo must have been taken from an early airplane a little after 1910.
This is how it looks nowadays. It's difficult to tell if there is still anything original from 100 years ago besides the monument. I don't see any of the original pine trees. By the way, in Mexico City, trees are usually green year-round.
The big white block on the upper right corner is the U. S. Embassy. This is a Google image.
Even parts of The Angel are not original, since it fell down during a strong earthquake in 1957, and broke.
lumea (the definite article is indicated at the end, "lume+a" in this case).
toată lumea
Italian
il mondo
tutto il mondo
The noun world is femenine only in Romanian; in the rest of the languages it is masculine.
todo el mundo fue a la fiesta
everybody went to the party
todo el mundo lo sabe
everybody knows it
le dijiste a todo el mundo
you told everybody
todo el mundo ha visto esa película
everybody has seen that movie
ya se fue todo el mundo
everybody left already
todo el mundo está feliz
everybody is happy
Alternatively, you could use todos i.e., todos fueron a la fiesta.
If you don't want to sound quite exaggerated, you can say in Spanish medio mundo sabe tu secreto, half the world knows your secret. Probably, only in Italian the meaning is literal, rather than everybody.
This is a vintage comic magazine for sale on the internet. If you pay attention to this cover, you don't need to know much Spanish to figure out what La Urbe de Hierro is. Try!
This word is related to the English words suburban, urban,and urbanization.
Hierro is iron.
So this is The Major City of Iron, which is one of the nicknames of New York in Spanish.
Do a search on the internet for "la urbe de hierro", with quotes, so you can see how we use this phrase.
Another nickname is La Gran Manzana, which means The Great Apple. The Big Apple would be La Manzana Grande. But still that's an easy one. And there is another one: La Ciudad de los Rascacielos, the Skyscraper City.
