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

[asciident]

Modern words starting with cua- were qua- until the Academy's 1815 orthography update.

It is also worth noting that the use of qu for /k/ before e and i results from the generalized loss (according to Penny (1991: 83-4), at a period prior to the development of written Spanish) of the glide [w] from reflexes of Latin QU-, as in the case of QUINDECIM, which became Spanish quince ('fifteen'). Before stressed /a/, however, the glide was not eliminated, and it was only in 1815 that the Academy replaced qua- by cua-. Thus modern cuando [kwándo] was written as quando until the last century.

(source for quote)

ETA: Also, Cuál es vs Cuáles is fucking hard to distinguish until you get used to accents and can understand the whole sentence more quickly.

[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.

[ysobel]

Eeeeenteresting.

(Not that I'm a language nerd.)

And "Cuál es" was the *entirety* of the sentence (which sometimes is sentence fragment), but I got dinged for putting "Cuáles" instead. (Granted, if I'd done the turtle version of the audio, where there's a longer space between words, I might have gotten it; but since it made sense in my head and didn't have conflicting context, I didn't bother. Mrrr. Silly website.

[darchildre]

Re: sentences of the day.

The French lessons keep giving me things like "Nous sommes seuls avec leurs enfants" - "we are alone with their children." It's a bit ominous.

(I mean, they also give me, "Je mange une baleine" - "I am eating a whale." But that's less creepy.)

[pauamma]

http://linguaphiles.livejournal.com/5365345.html