In earlier lessons, you learned to talk about the present, the past, and the future.
For example, you learned to use the present tense to talk about habitual actions and things that are generally true.
Foto: Andres Rueda CC BY 2.0 |
Foto: Douglas Fernandes CC BY 2.0 |
Foto: Daniel Lobo CC BY 2.0 |
Foto: El Alvi CC BY-SA 2.0 |
In this lesson, you will come across another, idiomatic use of the present tense that is especially common in interactions between waiters/waitresses and their clients, and salespeople and their customers.
Foto: MoRDi CuaC CC BY-SA 2.0 |
 Me trae un café, por favor. |
| ¿Cuánto le doy? |
Foto: Danielle Elder CC BY 2.0 |
To talk about future actions and your plans for the coming weekend or days, you have learned to use the ir + a + infinitivo construction:
Finally, you learned to discuss past activities using the preterite to talk about actions that happened in the past within a concrete block of time:
There are times when you may want to talk about how long you have been doing something, or inquire how long a certain action has been continuing. I have been cooking for an hour requires a very different construction in Spanish than in English:
If you want to find out how long something has been going on, you start your question with ¿Cuánto tiempo hace que…?
You may also answer this question by simply stating the period of time:
The Hace…que construction is also used to tell how long ago something happened; this is another way to talk about the past. In this case, the pretérito is used:
The same idea may be expressed by beginning the sentence with the verb phrase. In this case, the word que is omitted:
Candela Citations
- Lesson 12: Funciones . Authored by: Open Learning Initiative. Provided by: Carnegie Mellon. Located at: https://oli.cmu.edu/jcourse/lms/students/syllabus.do?section=037856eb80020ca6007833f93f06cd13. Project: Spanish1. License: CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
