"La cena estuvo muy buena."
Translation:The dinner was very good.
79 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Google translate uses "era" here. Seems like a fundamental description and of something that will always be true. That makes me think "ser" but the rules are so complex I'm open to anything being right here. "La cena era muy buena" has 2,830,000 google results and "La cena estuvo muy buena" has 160,000 results. Close enough to still be ambiguous to me. "Era" is the Imperfect and "estuvo" is the Preterit. Though the distinction is lost on me.
215
jfgordy. I think you're right. Look at this exemple : la niña es guapa. She probably is always guapa. La niña está guapa hoy con su vestido rojo / the girl is pretty today with her red dress, but maybe she won't be tomorrow with another dress.
2981
You would use ser ordinarily but the use of a estar makes it more emphatic ie that it was a really really good dinner.
Fui means "i went or i was" like "yo fui al parque- i went to the park" ir " yo fui muy feliz - i was very happy" and estuvo means that something or someone was something " el estuvo en la luna - he was in the moon" in this case estuvo was correct because it says that the dinner was good. Hope it helped.
Why can't I say 'nice' instead of 'good'? That's acceptable in English, thus should be for the translation.
I say 'tea' instead of 'dinner' in real life, and 'dinner' instead of 'lunch'. This is really annoying because I keep getting this question wrong because Duolingo doesn't accept 'tea' as an answer. But to complicate things further, there's another definition of tea which is the hot drink, so then people who don't say tea as dinner in real life will get confused. Can we PLEASE have a setting on Duolingo to whether we are American/English?
215
palaash- Normally, in many cases, when there is an accent at the preterito perfecto simple, it's because you have the same word in an other tense. EX :yo olvido, present tense. él olvidó, past tense. yo termino, present, él terminó, past. The accent makes the difference.
223
You can check out this page for the regular and irregular conjugation of verbs in the preterite tense, including that of estar: http://www.fluentu.com/spanish/blog/spanish-preterite-and-imperfect/
2004
The subject is “la cena”, not the person speaking. The person is saying the dinner was very good, not calling himself very good.
2004
"Estaba" is imperfect tense, which describes an ongoing action in the past.
The dinner, i.e. "la cena" was a one-time event that is over, a completed action which you are describing, so you must use a perfect tense, i.e., the preterite tense.
If you regularly have dinners cooked by the same people at the same restaurant or family home repeatedly, perhaps you could use the imperfect & say "Las cenas estaban muy buenas", the dinners were very good, it's a repeated action in the past, and also leaves open the implication that you will continue to go enjoy those ongoing dinners, as opposed to commenting about one specific past dinner you sat down, ate & finished, it's done, which requires perfect tense.
so, i said "The dinner was great!!" why does that not count?? Great is another translation to "muy buena"
1668
I came here to double-check on the same point, since I am sure that a couple of hours ago DL wanted me to translate ''La cena fue muy buena''. It seems from the comments above that the basic answer is that both are acceptable. Two comments suggest you use ''estar'' when the meal is particularly good. Best person to ask would be a Spanish waiter !