Spanish language Q&A Forum

This is more of a complaint that a question. There is confusion in tense nomenclature. What is often referred to here as Pretérito Perfecto is really Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto.  

The Pretérito Perfecto Simple is referred to Pretérito Indefinido.  The action in the Pretérito Perfecto Simple has definitely been "perfected".   When doing quizzes quickly I often make a mistake when the Pretérito Perfecto is asked for. It would be nice if a uniform terminology were used in the teaching of Spanish

Why is this wrong:  Mi abuela le entretiene mucho hacer punto?

‘The local police has captured the murderer.’

I’d say this should be ‘have captured’ in English,  ‘has’ sounds unnatural to me 

Dear Kwiziq,

In virtually all of the dictations I have completed, I have found that it is quite difficult to discern when a sentence ends based on the speakers voice. This is to say, the speaker lowers his/her voice in a way that implies the end of a sentence, but when the answer is shown it becomes apparent to me that the lowering of the speaker's voice was actually meant to convey a pause. Is this the natural way hispanohablantes speak --- whether from Spain or Central/South America?  Of course, as recommended, I do listen to the dictation before attempting to write it out, but I cannot memorize where sentences end vs. when there is a pause in the speaker's speech. Consequently, I'm constantly guessing at when the sentence ends. I am a native English speaker and typically, when translating spoken English to written form, lowering of the voice signifies a period --- not a pause (comma). As such, I often find it confusing (indeed, quite frustrating) to differentiate pauses from ends of sentences in the Kwiziq dictation exercises.

Pati Inez Ecuamiga

The question was to fill the missing word (the hint was only that heredero is masculine):

The Heir to the crown ....

______ heredero de la corona

I answered "El" and was told it is incorrect, it should have been "Un". This seems wrong?

Hi! Haven't been here in a while, now trying to improve my listening comprehension again. So I've been thinking:

Listening comprehension in Peninsular Spanish seems to be different from the Latin American variants, at least I, personally, struggle to understand some of them more than others. As I've seen that there's a whopping 770 items on the listening comprehension list, do you happen to have lessons that have some degree of specialization regarding the variant spoken in the lesson? If no, I think this would be an interesting feature. If yes, then being able to filter by that would be awesome. (And I understand that this would be a major task given the number of variants, but I thought I might still ask).

Hope you have a great weekend!

Judging by the very high quality of Spanish tuition offered by Kwiziq, I'm sure that you would like to ensure that your texts, too, always convey correct information. A "lunation" takes about 29½ days [this is an average, sometimes it can be several hours longer, or shorter] - not 28. So the moon does not perform 13 orbits every year. Instead, 12 of its circuits are completed in 354 days, so an Islamic year is usually about 11 days shorter than [our] Gregorian year.

The translation for final sentence in this exercise ("I would like to visit Medellín next year) was confusing for me.

I wrote:   "Querría a visitar a Medellín el próximo año. But "the best answer" was "Quiero visitar Medellín ..."

I find this confusing because I understand "quiero" to translate to I want/would like -- not I would want/I would like.

Please help up clear this confusion.

Regards,

I. Pati Ecuamiga

hi,

there are thousands of taxis with which you can move around the city,

hay miles de taxis con los que puedes moverte por la ciudad,

can por la ciudad be replaced by en los alrededores de la ciudad?

Let me know = can we use hacer saber?