45 Comments
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While I agree that it's not very good for beginners, like myself, I had my husband listen to it and he thought it was fine. Kind of like English speakers that tend to roll things together or "slur" over them.
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Be that as it may, the person to whom the question is addressed will be able to understand it in the context of the situation as he/she will be clealy reading something. In the context of language learning, it is not possible to infer such a situation. I am a native speaker of Spanish doing this course along with my students (just to see what they are learning and use it in the classroom) and after clicking the audio button three times, I still didn't understand what the woman was trying to utter. What I'm trying to say is that you have a valid point, but audio should be clear for effective learning to occur.
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Is there not an actual word " DO " in Spanish?
Is it always understood to be there?
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Isn't "reading" when you have to add -ndo? Like caminando (or something similarly spelt, I'm not that far in Spanish yet, just learning from comments).
- 24
OK. If I say 'estudio' it can mean I study, I do study, or I am studying. If I say estoy estudiando the emphasis is on the fact that I am studying 'right now.' SO, if I am asked, "how you spending you free time these days?" I can say "estudio espanol,' for "I am studying Spanish" in the general sense. If I am studying Spanish and someone calls me and asks "Watcha doing'?" I say "Estoy estudiando." for "Right now, I am studying Spanish. Duo does not always accept the continuous form for present tense, but the mods will say it is fine, as will my teachers in the US, Argentina, and Mexico. ;)
- 12
Oh wow. I'm thinking my Spanish is always going to be basic. There's so much! Thank you for responding.
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You'll make progress, but don't just rely on Duo. Get to a garage sale or used book store and get a used text or grammar book, and a decent dictionary, and find a good site online to explain the grammar (like I did above), like www.studyspanish.com (you'll need to cut and paste the ink)
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- 2099
There is the verb "hacer" but that is "to do" and a bit different I guess.
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There's only "To do", as a verb, but as the auxiliary verb.
To formulate questions, when writing, you have the inverted question mark (¿), so that you can know it's a question before reading the whole sentence.
When speaking, you know it's a question by the intonation.
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Is there no difference between simple present tense and present continuous? Between "What do you read" (=generally) and "What are you reading" (=now)?
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Yeah there is a difference with the simple present tense you can state habits and use it for the historical present(storying telling,etc). Duolingo inconsistently accepts simple present tense as present continuous though.
if "lees" is for 'you', 'he', 'she' and 'it', could not [Que Lees] also mean "what does she read?" or "what does it read?" Why must it only be "what do you read"?
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I think "lees" is only "you read". You're thinking of "lee". http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/leer#conjugation
- 13
You need to to distinguish between tú and usted. Spanish, like many other languages, has a familiar and formal form of you.
Is this question essentially assuming the tú is a given. ie Could it be written as ¿Qué tú lees? or Tú qué lees?
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it dosn't matter to many spanish speakers (me sometimes) pronunciated like that
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Es una mierda de pronunciación. Hablo español como lengua madre y les hago informar que esta pronunciación está mal.
I literally typed What do you read which is the direct translation and it said I was wrong
Am I the only one who got confused that it, without knowledge of the meaning of this, meant "What read?" Until now, It never asked me what this meant.
I put "What did you read?" instead of "what do you read?". How would you indicate the difference?
