recién - not until

Question

In the following sentence: “Y fui a mi casa recién dos días después.”  does recién still means just or is not until a better translation.

Silvia Piriz · Accepted Answer

Hola Robert y David
Thanks, David — that’s a great clarification!
Just to add, in Latin American Spanish—especially in countries like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—recién is often used in a temporal sense to mean “just”, “only just”, or even “not until”, depending on context.
In the sentence “Fui a mi casa recién dos días después”, the meaning is something like “I only went to my house two days later”, or “I didn’t go to my house until two days later”, with the negative being implied, as David pointed out.
In European Spanish, this usage is much less common, and speakers would more likely say “No fui a mi casa hasta dos días después” to express the same idea more clearly. So the key takeaway is that recién + time expression can often imply a delay or lateness, even when there’s no explicit negative in the sentence.
Hope this helps anyone navigating regional differences!
Saludos
Silvia

David McNaughton · Answer

Robert > "I went to my house only two days later", or "I went to my house just two days later" both seem to be correct translations?

If, on the other hand, we wanted to say "I did not go to my house until two days afterwards" [or "... two days later"], then we would surely need a definite negative word in the sentence.

David McNaughton · Answer

Robert -My Grammar book [by Butt and Benjamin] gives one example of 'recién' being used with a verb in the future:"Recién mañana llegará", translating it as: "He won't be here until tomorrow".As mentioned in Inma's Kwiziq lesson, using 'recién' with verbs is a feature of Latin American Spanish.My Grammar book mentions that in Spain, people would say: "No llegará hasta mañana".