Quote:
Originally Posted by Hopper  You know, at school when I was taught French, we went through the verbs, so it was:
je travaille, tu, ille, elle, nous and vous etc but I never understood just what they were getting at, we just learnt then verbatim without understanding the real meaning behind them.
I knew Je was I, Tu was You, Ille was he, elle was she and nous was we and vous was they (I think) - is there the similar in Spanish? |
Yes, ... and No!
Yes, because like any language Spanish has "I", "me", "you", "they", words, but No, because in Spanish, you don't need them to form a verbal clause (the bit of a sentence that contains the verb, like "I hit").
This is because, in terms of what I said before, hablar is the
infinitive, in English "to talk/speak". If you want to say
I speak, you just need the
first person singular verb part. This is because the verb conjugates, and the endings are different depending on which "person" you mean, and whether that "person" is "singular" or "plural".
So, to conjugate the verb
hablar:
hablo (1st person singular)
hablas (2nd person singular)
habla (3rd person singular)
hablamos (1st person plural)
hablais (2nd person plural)
hablan (3rd person plural)
The result is that to say
I speak, you don't need a word for
I, because it is conveyed by the verb ending "o". It will be clear to everyone that when you say
hablo, you mean "I speak". Spanish only uses pronouns (the I, me, you, he, words) for emphasis. If you wanted to emphasise that it was you speaking rather than someone else, then you would use "I", and that in Spanish is "Yo".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hopper So lets say in its absloute basic and I want to go and order a couple of beers,
Dos cerveser por favor (please ignore my spelling, it bad in English never mind Spanish  ) is 2 beers please but if I wanted to say 'I would like to buy 2 beers please' what would I say and what would be the breakdown of that sentence re Nouns, Verbs etc. |
Immediately it gets complicated, because in English, the word "would" is a "conditional". Verbs have "moods", and the conditional is one of them. In Spanish you would be much more likely to use the
mood everyone uses every day as the norm ... it's called the
indicative. Instead of "I would like" (quisiera) you would therefore say "I want" (quiero). In actual fact, you would just say
Dos cervezas por favor anyway!
The breakdown of the sentence, though is as follows:
I want: first person singular of the
verb "to want", indicative mood ... OR
I would like: first person singular of the
verb "to want", conditional mood.
to buy: verb again, this time the infinitive (for reasons that can wait
, though enough to say, for now, that Spanish, like English, uses the infinitive after certain verbs, including "to want")
two: adjective, describes the noun, which is beer. If you were asking for a
cold beer, then
cold would be an adjective as well. There is no theoretical limit to the number of adjectives a noun can have, e.g. a red large spotted hard broken ball … all adjectives describing the ball.
EDIT: Hopper please ignore this ...
I
know that quisiera is actually the imperfect subjunctive ... it's just not the right time to bring it up!