The Student's Corner

I want with this entry to let you write your doubts and questions and share them with other students and with me. I'll answer the questions as soon as I find a gap to do so and post it later on here. You can send your questions to this email: echodusilence@yahoo.es (please let me know in the email if I can put your name, no surname, with your nationality on the website. Very often your questions make complete sense if you know what language the person speaks).

Mistakes are not always mistakes. How to interpret that? If you say:

-Hoy he hacido los deberes.

On one side, you "made a mistake" by not putting the right participle of the verb hacer, which is "hecho", an exception to the rule.

On the other hand, that "mistake" means you know the rule of formation of participle, which is clearly represented with the ending -ido (2º conjugation). So, we could say you made a mistake, but you also applied a rule. I wouldn't call that mistake. Maybe you just forgot temporarily the exception or maybe you didn't even know it yet.

Ok, let's start with a classic, a statement I've heard from almost all the students I've had:

1. Can I say "quiero mucho ir a España"?

This kind of statement is so logic for all students, that they can't believe it's impossible to say it in Spanish. The actual answer is you can't. Mucho, as you probably know works as an adjective of quantity, so it has to agree with the noun that follows in gender and number: mucho tiempo, mucha gente, muchos amigos, muchas mujeres... But also as an adverb (it doesn't agree with any nouns or other words), and never as an adverb of quantity, only of frequency with the verb querer. If you change the order in this sentence we got:

- Quiero ir a España mucho. (Often, many times)

But It'll never mean the magnitude of your desire (I insist, with the verb querer). Does that mean you just can't express this in Spanish? You can, but saying a different thing like:

- Me gustaría mucho ir a España.
- Me encantaría ir a España.

With the verb gustar, mucho can express the magnitude of your desire.