"Él hablaba de ella."
Translation:He was talking about her.
28 Comments
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You are very inconsistent with this tense. Sometimes you only accept "He was talking about her" and say it was wrong if I also added "He talked about her". Now here is the reverse. I am not sure what to do in these cases any more!
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Don't know what Duolingo is teaching but:
Hablaba - was talking
Habló - talked
comía - war eating
comió - ate
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Except we're taught that imperfect means
talked
was talking
used to talk
would talk [as a matter of habit, regularly, over some time in the past, as in "when we were young we would talk about classmates a lot" - as opposed to the conditional "would talk" - "I would talk if I knew the vocabulary"]
Also: estuve/estaba hablando = "was talking"
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I have the opposite problem. Duolingo seems to accept whichever form I use "was + verb" or "preterit." Consequently, I'm never entirely sure what would be the best option in any particular case.
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I agree with you completely in the two tenses you mention. But in the multiple choice answers to the imperfect indicative they are very inconsistent in what the accept and even in straight translations. They seem to teach it correctly but score it incorrectly far too often.
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I thought about this too. Because in the past i have seen 'de ella' as 'to her'. I looked up 'hablar de' and it means 'talk about or speak of'. So I believe that is what is going on in this sentence.
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Why is this not "used to talk about" instead of "talked about". I cant see what is different in these sentences to explain different translations in the same lesson.
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Am i the only one who thinks these two sentences have totally different meanings????
1)He talked about her.
2)He used to talk about her.
Maybe its just in the deep south, but sentence #2 inplies that he doesn't talk about her anymore.
I only mention it because I have seen that option almost every instance as "another translation" and i just want native spanish speakers know that it is not perceived the same when you say "used to."
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In English they certainly have very different connotations if not outright meanings, but the distinctions seem to be a lot more flexible in Spanish.
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I put "He would talk of her" to differentiate between imperfect and preterite but it was counted wrong.
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That sounds more like a one-off action, which would use the preterite tense: 'hablo' with accent on the 'o'.
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The word 'la' can mean several things, but one of them isn't 'her', which is 'ella'.
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La is ok as a direct object pronoun. This is not a DOP. It is an object of a preposition so it has to be de ella when refering to her or a feminine "it"
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Nothing, as far as I know. "would speak/talk" is one of the translations I learned of imperfect tense. I'd report it.
He talked about her was accepted. Quite right. As in he talked about her every day Context.