"Yo les quiero mandar flores hermosas."

Translation: I want to send them beautiful flowers.

[karin484473]

can someone illustrate the difference between "I want them to send beautiful flowers" and "I want to send them beautiful flowers"?

[Adam_Nyiri]

It needs to be a sentence with two parts. You have to write "Quiero que..." which means "I want that..." So in this sentence it would be: "Quiero que (ellos) mandan flores hermosas." There might be another way to do it, but that's how I'd do it.

[karin484473]

thank you. I think I get it!!

[Adam_Nyiri]

Actually I think we have to use "manden" because it turns imperitive when you use Quiero que. I just went over it again. It is one of the last lessons.

[AniOhevYayin]

Close. Quiero que requires subjunctive because it's sort of like a wish. (So you got the morphology--the form of the verb, correct, manden, but its mood is subjunctive rather than imperative.) If we wanted to add "to them" (to slightly alter the sentence), I think we would need "les" but "a ellos" would be optional: Quiero que ellos les manden flores hermosas a ellos, "I want them to send beautiful flowers to them." But I think we could use Quisiera, "I would like," in which case we are back to using the infinitive: Quisiera mandarles flores, " I would like to send them flowers." I'm not sure which form is most natural to Spanish, however, as I am not a native speaker. When I did this one (Yo les quiero mandar flores hermosas) I got it wrong--I put "I want them to send pretty flowers"--so I appreciate the question and the response here.

[stefani775122]

That's what I put too

[IloveNorm]

I have used pretty for hermosa but not accepted here

[Scott31461]

Same here.

[Anita98586]

ditto... I reported it

[MavisClose1]

pretty=beautiful, right? I put pretty.....it was marked wrong.

[Michael189866]

But one is more so than the other, and it all depends where you're from and what you are talking about. Then you have to fit in "lovely" ! I haven't been able to work out what the gradation is in Spanish yet, but DL has bonito, hermoso and bello (so far), and is inconsistent about what it accepts as a translation.

[SariahLily]

In my experience, hermoso seems to be one of the strongest. I always translate it to beautiful.

[Michael189866]

Just noticed, if you click on @hermosas@ it comes up with "beautiful", "splendid" and "lovelies". No that's not a typo on my part. Who put this question together, my lovelies ?

[Michael189866]

Sadly, @ is what the PC English International keyboard comes up with when you type a quotation mark. Until you change to the normal keyboard.

[SergeBerna3]

Pretty should be accepted

[HarryMcDon11]

How would you say "I want them to send beautiful flowers"?

I got mixed up here

[SariahLily]

Quiero que ellos manden flores hermosas.

Though it feels "off" without saying who they're being sent to.

[PhanNguyen906909]

Just curious here, "I want to send them..." can be "Yo quiero les mandar.."? How wrong can this be? Thanks.

[SariahLily]

No, the "les" can be in front of the conjugated verb, or attached to the end of the infinitive, but not between them.

So, either:

"les quiero mandar" or

"quiero mandarles"

[nicklearn]

Notice there is no "a" between "quiero" and the infinitive "mandar".
Earlier, there was an "a" between "ayudo" and the infinitive "pintar".

[SariahLily]

Yes, because "ayudar" requires a preposition to link it to an infinitive. "Querer" does not.

Unfortunately, you have to learn these individually; there's no blanket rule to tell you which verbs need a preposition and which don't. But if you pay attention to the first verb, and note its preposition (or lack thereof), over time it'll start to "sound right."