Spanish language Q&A Forum

I believe these were prompts etc for Spain and not LatAM... You had asked me to give you specifics:  Kwizbot gave me a very "Castilian" (Spain) hint with la mar de. It’s a colorful, slightly informal way to say "extremely" or "a lot of."

These two goals are going to be extremely difficult to achieve,

goal = objetivo, extremely = la mar de

Also this sentence:

but it is all about getting down to it and getting used to it. 

Kwizbot: pero todo es ponerse a ello y acostumbrarse. 

I was tempted to use "se trata de"... and found out that a person in Mexico or Colombia would likely say that specific sentence:

"...pero se trata de ponerse ….

Also this sentence:

 she could take a trip to some special place 

Kwizbot: 

ella podría dedicarse un viaje a algún sitio especial

You

ella podría hacer un viiaje en algún sitio especialIn Latin America, you are far more likely to hear "hacer un viaje" or even "tomar un viaje."

This seems similar to the Se accidental construction with the exception that the action is happening directly to the object instead of indirectly. In both instances the action seems to be unattributable. 

I don’t understand how the infinitive is less ambiguous than the gerund. Is it because the infinitive is directly associated with the verbal structure while the gerund could hypothetically be separated from the verbal structure by a comma? La escuché, (while I was) cantando en la ducha. 

Regarding incomplete and complete actions: Let’s say you’re hypothetically talking to someone about Carlos.

 He visto a Carlos fumar. 

I saw Carlos smoke. (complete action) Does this mean, I saw Carlos smoking. (But now he’s back at his desk. (action complete))

He visto a Carlos fumando.
I saw Carlos smoking. (action in progress) While this means I saw Carlos smoking. (He is still smoking outside if you are looking for him. (action in progress)) 

Thanks!

This lesson overcomplicates what should be a pretty straightforward use of the simple future tense. Just look at all the questions on this topic! While all of us know that the future is not fixed or 100% predictable, we still make predictions that sound pretty guaranteed even if they are technically probabilities.

The quiz questions complicate this further by giving us examples that are, frankly, poor translations. For example, one quiz question asks us to translate: "With this crisis, the currency could lose value." I would bet serious money that if you gave this sentence to 100 native Spanish professors, at least in Mexico, not a single one of them would ever give the supposedly correct answer: "Con esta crisis la moneda perderá valor." Not a single one of my three Mexican professors, including a DELE examiner, translated "could lose" as "perderá."

They all used "podría" for "could," with either "podría perder valor" or "podría depreciarse." Conversely, in reverse translation of the Spanish answer to English, they all 100% translated "perderá valor" as "will lose value", with certainty—not as "could lose value."

Maybe Spanish from Spain is different, but that quiz question and translation are not correct in Mexican Spanish. I suggest editing the lesson and quiz questions to remove the "could, might" possibility from translations using the simple future tense—at least in the Latin American Spanish lessons. At best, it's confusing, but more likely, it's just not a good translation.