Spanish language Q&A Forum

You answered a question at the bottom this section  (to Papi on April 16,            2018) and said:

This sentence could be using both "fui" and "era" depending on the the timeframe when the action happened, being more specific (preterite) or more irrelevant (imperfect).

Could you expand a bit on the "irrelevant (imperfect)" which is an interesting perspective, I hadn't come across before. 

Point in quiz being referred to:

Mi prima ________ Miss Universo. .My cousin was Miss Universe HINT: Conjugate "ser" in Pretérito indefinido

Hello lovely people, it's Friday which means we get a new set of weekend workouts, literally my best part of the week.

Inma, I love the dictations, even though I'm not very good at them yet, however I have two general questions about them, and wondered if you could help.
1. Vocabulary - When I listen to lessons, even lessons A1, I encounter vocabulary that I don't know. When the dictacions are written, are you using this as an opportunity to expand our vocabulary, or are you writing within what you expect us to know?  I don't mind which, I just wondered if my vocab is weak.  I use it as a learning opportunity!

2. English translation - I believe that the dictations are the only place where we don't see an English translation of what was said / written. Is this intentional? As per my point above, I sometimes don't know the words even when they are written, and I use SpanishDict to translate.  This has some disadvantages, for example in today's A1 exercise, Spanishdict translated "partes" meant as anywhere in your text, to "private parts", as in on a human :-)
Thanks, now back to work.

Saludos, Inma and disculpame,

pero, I notice that there are a lot of "p" popping sounds in the audio of "Ropa de Invierno" and remembered hearing that the Spanish alphabet should be able to be pronounced in front of  a candle without blowing it out. How are the lips and tongue placed to pronounce "p" , "t"  and "s" to achieve that goal, please?

Garry

How does one determine whether to use "sido" or "estado" with haber in such instances as "I have been a good person..." or "I have been seen with ..." or "I have not been trying hard to..."?

Also, with regard to "he, has, ha....etc.", is this conjugation referred to as the present perfect indicative, the past perfect indicative (preterito perfecto), or both?

There doesn’t seem to be an example or text relating to placement in a tense with auxiliary ‘ha’ etc. I gather from the quiz question that you cannot interpose  nunca as in ‘no he nunca visto eso’. As this is the natural order in English (I have never seen that) it would be good to have some explicit mention in the text and examples. 

There seems to be a lot of doubt in this sentence. What would trigger only the subjunctive?

Thank you. K