Question on the use of apetece
Here is a question put to me by Jan, a student of mine. My answer is below.
I’ve used apetece in the sense of ‘fancying’ something to eat or drink - Is it correct to use it in this way?
Me apetece chocolate
Another question.
‘Me siento contento’ - ‘I feel happy’
Would it be OK to use feliz for happy, as in - Siento feliz if so, what is the difference between the two expressions?
Jan
Hi Jan,
Yes, ‘apetece’ is used in this way. Perfect! My sentence above could be translated as ‘I don’t fancy studying’.
‘Feliz’ and ‘contento’? Now you’ve opened up a can of worms! Are you feeling like a beginner to intermediate today, or an advanced student?
Beginner: They mean the same, use them interchangeably
Advanced: ‘Contento’ would be the more temporary emotion. ‘Feliz’ would be more permanent, and could be used to describe characteristics of a person or a thing.
‘Estoy contento porque hoy hace sol’ - ‘I’m happy because it’s sunny today’
‘Soy feliz con la vida que tengo’ - ‘I’m happy with the life I have’
‘Es una persona feliz’ - ‘he’s a happy person’
‘Alegre’ could also be used in this last example.
Translating ´to feel´ in Spanish
The obvious translation for this verb is ’sentir’ or ’sentirse’, but there are many instances where this is not appropriate. Let’s have a look at how to translate this verb into Spanish.
1) You use ’sentir’ for translating ‘to feel’ when you are talking about emotions:
‘Me siento contento’ - ‘I feel happy’
‘Se sintió un profundo sentimiento de odio’ - ’she felt a deep sense of hatred’
However, there are other verbs that can be used in this situation, for example:
‘Tiene miedo’ - ‘he feels fear’, ‘he is afraid’
2) ‘Tener’ is also used when you are talking about sensations:
‘Tengo hambre’ - ‘I feel hungry’
Tenían frío - ‘they were cold’
3) When ‘to feel’ means ‘to seem’, the Spanish use ‘parecer’
‘Parece que va a hacer sol’ - ‘it feels like it’s going to be sunny’
‘Parece áspero’ - ‘it feels rough’
4) When ‘to feel’ means ‘to touch’, use ‘tocar’
‘El médico me tocó el estómago’ - ‘the doctor felt my stomach’
‘Todos tocaron el cuero’ - ‘everyone felt the leather’
5) When ‘to feel’ is used to gve an opinion, the Spanish use ‘pensar’ or ‘creer’ or a similar verb
‘Pienso que no trabajas bien’ - ‘I feel you are not working well’
6) ‘To feel like’ means ‘to want to’, so the Spanish use a verb that has that meaning
‘No me apetece estudiar’ - ‘I don’t feel like studying’
Using these constructions, does anyone want to give us some sentences to translate?
Using the verb ´tener´
There are many expressions that use the verb ‘tener’ (often in English these use the verb ‘to be’). It is a nice trick to use them, because once you have learnt to conjugate ‘tener’, all you have to do is add the appropriate word, and you have another verb!
For example, ‘tener suerte’ is ‘to be lucky’, so to say ‘I am lucky’, you simply conjugate ‘tener’ in the first person singular present, ‘tengo’, and then add ’suerte’, ‘tengo suerte’. The great thing is that you can put ‘tener’ into whatever tense you want, and then add ’suerte’. So, ‘has tenido suerte’ would be ‘you have been lucky’, and ‘tendrás suerte’ would be ‘you will be lucky’.
Other expressions are:
Tener razón - to be right
Tener X años - to be X years old
Tener calor - to be hot
Tener frío - to be cold
Tener hambre - to be hungry
Tener sed - to be thirsty
Tener cara - to be cheeky
Tener cuidado - to be careful
Tener éxito - to be successful
Tener miedo - to be scared
Tener prisa - to be in a hurry
Preposition ´a´
You won’t be speaking Spanish for very long before you come across this preposition. You usually start with the meaning of ‘to’ when used with the verb ‘to go’, ‘ir’. It is handy in this respect because it means ‘to’ when saying ‘to go to a place’, and ‘to be going to do something’.
Here are a couple of examples:
1) ‘Yesterday I went to the beach’ – ‘ayer fui a la playa’
2) ‘Tomorrow I’m going to eat an omelette’ – ‘mañana voy a comer una tortilla’
It also means ‘to’ when introducing a named indirect object pronoun, as in ‘I gave the present to James’ – ‘di el regalo a Jaime’
There are other uses, though:
1) It is often used to connect a verb with a following infinitive:
a. ‘Ha venido a hablar conmigo’ – ‘he has come to speak to me’
b. ‘Comencé a llorar’ – ‘I started to cry’
2) It is used in expressions of time to mean ‘at’:
a. ‘Salió a las 4’ – ‘he went out at 4 o’clock’
3) It is often used to show how something is done:
a. ‘Fueron a pie’ – ‘they went on foot’
b. ‘Lo hicieron a mano’ – ‘they did it by hand’
4) It is used to introduce a direct object that is a person, but since this causes especial difficulty, I want to deal with this use of ‘a’ another time.
‘Más vale llegar a tiempo que en convidado’.
This means ‘it is better to arrive on time than to be invited’, and the English equivalent idiom would be ‘first come, first served’.
Putting ‘Haber’ in the Infinitive
We know that the verb ‘haber’ is the auxiliary verb that is used in compound tenses like the perfect tense (I have done something) and the pluperfect tense (I had done something). In most of the examples that we look at, we conjugate the auxiliary verb in order to give us the tense that we require. However, there are times when we don’t want to conjugate ‘haber’, in the same way that we don’t always do it in English. For example, in the sentence, ‘I want to have finished’, the perfect tense is in the infinitive (what we call a ‘perfect infinitive’) because it comes directly after the verb ‘to want’, and as we know, a verb after ‘to want’ is usually in the infinitive.
We can use this rule for all instances where a verb causes the next verb to be in the infinitive. Sentences like ‘I have to have done it’, ‘he’s going to have seen it’, and ‘I can’t have done it’ are all examples of this type of construction.
In Spanish this is pretty simple, because what we do is put the auxiliary in the infinitive, i.e. keep it as ‘haber’, and then put the past participle after it in the normal way. So, ‘haber hecho’, for example, means ‘to have done’. ‘Haber visto’ means ‘to have seen’, and so on.
The four sentences mentioned above, then, go like this:
1) ‘Yo quiero haber terminado’
2) ‘Yo tengo que haberlo hecho’
3) ‘El va a haberlo visto’
4) Yo no puedo haberlo hecho
Notice that the object pronoun ‘lo’ goes on the end of ‘haber’, as per the rule that it goes on the end of the infinitive. It could also go before the first verb in the sentence in each case - so sentence number 2 could have been ‘yo lo tengo que haber hecho’.
Loaf of Belen
Fiona is a member of our Spanish language Club. She lives in Cartagena and has a wide range of interests including Karate & mineral collecting. She writes a blog on her life in Spain. Below is one of the blogs she wrote about Belens;
I am not religious but I have enjoyed looking at the different Belens in towns in Spain. The cagon figure always gives me a laugh. Unfortunately they don´t include him in the main Belen in Cartagena.I thought it might be fun if those of us who live in Spain post a picture of our local Belen. I´ll start the ball rolling with a picture of a loaf made in the shape of one from a local baker´s. I´ll post some more of the one in my barrio and the main Cartagena one once these are fully operational at the weekend.
Question on the past subjunctive
Here is a question I received from a member of our Spanish Club about the past subjuntive. My reply is beneath.
Hi guys,
Could someone give me a bit of grammatical aid on the past subjunctive?
The example Matthew gives for ‘I wanted you to paint my house’ is ‘Quería que pintase la casa’.
‘Quería’ means ‘I was wanting’ and is imperfect and ‘Quise’ means ‘I wanted’ and is preterite so wouldn’t the sentence rather be ‘Quise que pintase la casa’?
There is prob an easy explanation for this that I just cannot see or understand.
Any help would be very much appreciated,
Thanks
Dave
Hi Dave, I love discussions like this!
So, the question is ‘is it ‘quería’, or is it ‘quise’?’
This boils down to the difference between the preterite and the imperfect tenses. The preterite refers to an action that happened once or a set number of times, and the imperfect refers to a habitual action, or something that happened over an indefinite time. Now, how many times did you want the person to paint your house? Once? Twice? Five times? Really, it’s a silly question, isn’t it? You just wanted it to happen.
We refer to ‘to want’ as a verb of state. When you want something, are you actually doing anything? There’s no actual action involved, is there? Other verbs of state include ‘to think’, ‘to believe’, ‘to know’, etc. You can see that if you put these verbs in the past, it would be very difficult to say how many times they happened. Because of this, I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to say these verbs in the preterite. I have never, ever used ‘querer’ in the preterite in nearly 40 years of speaking Spanish. Indeed, it is so un-used in the preterite, (if that’s a word), that if you say ‘no quise’, it doesn’t actually mean ‘to want’ at all, it means ‘to refuse’.
Having said that, if you really want to get into it, ‘querer’ in the preterite could give the impression that you wanted to do something, but didn’t do it, but ‘querer’ in the imperfect can have this meaning as well, so we come back to my position where it’s just never necessary to use.
‘Quien paga, elige’
This means ‘he who pays, chooses’.
An English equivalent would be ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune’.
Question & answer on when to use estar in the imperfect tense
I was asked this question recently by Phil, a language student on our SLS Spanish Club…
Hola Mathew, I am having a real problem getting my head round the imperfect tense, as in when to use estar and not use estar, for example, how would you say to someone? I was speaking to your friend last night. would it be? Hablaba con tu amigo anoche, estaba hablando con tu amigo anoche, estuve con tu amigo anoche, or hablé con tu amigo anoche,
hope you can help.
My response to Phil was this…
Mmmm. Not an easy one.
First things first - you can bin ‘hablé…’. That means ‘I spoke’.
I personally never, ever use ‘estar’ in the preterite - ‘estuve’. Never. That’s one of several verbs that I don’t use in the preterite precisely because the difference between ‘estaba’ and ‘estuve’ is so slight that it’s just not worth worrying about. So you can bin that one too.
So, it boils down to the difference between ‘estaba hablando’ and ‘hablaba’. I’m tempted to say that the difference between these two is slight as well, but actually there is a difference. If you use the ‘estar’ construction, there is a sense that you are emphasising the actual moment you were speaking to him in some way. It’s as if you’re going to follow that up with ‘…when the phone rang’, or some such interrupting action.
If you were following it up with ‘…and he said to me…’ then you would use the imperfect, because this would have happened during the discussion.
I have to say though, that this difference is not huge, and in probably 99% of cases, there will be little or no reason to choose one over the other. I have to say that in 25 years of speaking Spanish, I have never had to explain myself to a Spanish speaker because I had used one of these when I should have used the other.
I hope this helps, but come back to me if you have any more questions.
