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- "Como você chegou a estes liv…
"Como você chegou a estes livros raros?"
Translation:How did you get these rare books?
22 Comments
I agree. I thought the sentence meant ‘How did you come by those rare books.’ This was rightly graded as erroneous, but the correct translation looks like my translation was right! There's (almost) no clue that we're actually talking about arriving rather than acquiring.
To figure that out I had to spend quite some time with dictionaries which wasn't made easier by standard combinations like ‘chegar a uma conclusão’.
If this sentence needs to be in the exercise (maybe because it's so confusing) it has to be accompanied by an explanation that is revealed when you check your answer.
Maybe there's a word missing: "Como você chegou CONSEGUIR estes livros raros?"
I think that conseguir makes sense, but perhaps it should be written like this: "Como você chegou a conseguir estes livros raros? Not 100% sure.
word reference.com:
5)... a situação chegou a surpreender o director.
6)... nunca os dois que sois poderíeis chegar a ser um só.
Yes, that seems better - even if it is not the same language, Spanish has a similar form: "Cómo llegaste a conseguir ..." I wasn't sure, so I left the "a" out
"Como você chegou a esses livros" means "how did you get to those books", "how did you come by those books", "how did you find those books".
If you use "conseguir" alone, "como você conseguiu esses livros":
- How did you manage to find/get those books?
You can't use both together in this sentence with "como". "Chegar a + verb" means "to come to the point of + verbing".
- Você chegou a falar com ela? = Did you manage to talk to her? / Were you able to talk to her?
- O som era tão alto que chegou a quebrar a janela = The sound was so loud that it came to the point of breaking the window. (It even broke the window)
Using both together is used sometimes, but never in questions with como. It will mostly mean "to be able to", but following a process.
- Ele chegou a conseguir falar com ela = He managed to her (at some point)
"Chegar" is very versatile and doesn't just mean "arrive" in the physical sense: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/portuguese-english/chegar-a
2391
Won't you ever accept words given in "hint". It's tiring when you do not accept ANY of the words proposed in "hint"!