Whyyyy

[ysobel]

So I got to the question unit

for the record, the relevant words are:

qué - what
quién(es) - who
cuál(es) - which
cómo - how
cuánto - how many/much
cuándo - when

(with a note that cuál is used before es when not asking for definition. Qué es una gata = what is a cat, cuál es tu gata = which is your cat)

and AUGH SPANISH WHY are some of these q and some c? I mean, cómo I get, but why cuánto/cuándo and not quánto/quándo WHYYYYY

(Okay, so it's not the same sound, because cu is [kw] and qu is [k] and so it makes sense, *but* English qu is [kw] and so I keep writing quándo when they say cuándo, sob.)

ETA Another sob: Cuál es (which is it) and Cuáles (which-plural) sound the same wah.

#

In I-amuse-myself news, Duolinguo gave me "¿Cuándo bebes vino?" -- when do you drink wine -- as a question to translate, so of course I had to say aloud, in a super dramatic voice, "Yo no bebo ... *vino*..."

#

ETA Sentence of the day: Nosotros no tocamos el pollo! (We don't touch the chicken)

Previous sentences of the day (on other days) include Yo soy un oso (I am a bear) and Yo soy un pingüino (I am a penguin).

Comments

[synecdochic]

I know why they're probably teaching you guys to include the pronouns when you're first starting out, but Spanish sentences look so odd with them included to me! (We were always taught "only include the pronoun if it's necessary to distinguish the sentence" -- so, not for first person singular, first person plural, or second person informal.)

Listening to you writing your experiences is totally making me want to go do the drills, too! I remember about half the grammar and maaaaaaybe 10% of the vocab I ever learned. I was pretty fluent for a while!

[ysobel]

Yeah, the pronoun use feels a little odd, especially with yo/tu/nosotr@s. But then again, even so, there are people conflating the -es plural marker with the -es second person present conjugation, and people saying "but whyyy can't you say 'quienes come' as well as 'quienes comen', and stuff.

Also lots of loltastic confusion about grammatical gender.

So ... yeah. I'm not taking Duolinguo as expert in anything (see also one sentence where the audio pronounced 'habla' as 'ow-bla', which made me wtf a bit) but it's useful for the "do a bit at a time without getting overwhelmed" aspect.