26 Comments
I have two questions for anyone willing to answer: Could I rearrange the sentence to, "Por qué ella no habló ayer," and it still mean the same thing? And, if I wanted to say, "Why didn't you(Ud.) speak to her yesterday," could I say, "Por qué no le habló a ella ayer?"
Luis: Thanks once again. I am soooo glad you are here and take the time to help.
Note in interogative sentences Spanish often puts the subject after the verb like in the lesson sentence above.
do you have to say ella or el after hablo so if you're speaking out loud they know you're using the past tense with hablo and not the present tense?
slowmotionfro- Anyway, hablo, present tense and habló past tense, don't have the stress on the same vowel. So during the conversation you'll hear if it's present or past. For present the stress is on A and for past, the stress is on O, with the written accent.
Inversion? Until now there was no inversion in Spanish questions, so I suppose it is not obligatory. When is inversion used in Spanish? Is it more official?
I speak fluent spanish and this really means, "Why did she not call yesterday?" , not "Why did she not talk yesterday?" That is a confusing meaning and should be revised
joe- 2 mistakes : porqué, because it's an interrogation and no hablo without accent is nonsense in your sentence : why I don't speak yesterday, that's what you're saying. That's why accents are so important, habló is for él/ella/usted
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I guess Joe just doesn't have the means to type accents.
It should be "por qué" as an interrogative, though. Two words. Porqué means "reason".
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Ella is the subject here, doing the speaking. Only direct objects get a personal a.
Could it also be translated to "Why didn't she say something yesterday?" "Why did she not SPEAK yesterday" sounds like bad English to me.
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Those sentences have different meanings. You'd say "Why didn't she say something yesterday?" if she had some kind of issue yesterday that she did not talk about. I'd translate this as "¿Por qué no habló ella nada ayer?"
The original sentence, however, indicates that she didn't speak at all that day, maybe because of a throat infection. "Why did she not speak/talk yesterday?" Or "Why did she not call yesterday?" in context of phone calls.
Thanks. Sounds right. Maybe not the most useful of phrases available on Duolingo even though it gave extra training on "habló".
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Duo is not much for giving you useful phrases, but it aims to give you the tools to form the useful phrases yourself. :)
