Le, el, ella

Yeah, yeah...

All right dude, it was just a compliment. Take it or leave it as you please.

I forgot how to use deber (Isn't 'I must' irregular?)

Yo - ?
tu - debes
nos - debemos

Juan,

you said : "No, Xatufan por supuesto que no. Como podrias pensar eso de mi? Te lo digo sinceramente. Sabes que, yo he notado que tu ortografia castellana es mejor que la mia."


Amazing, as a french native speaker, i understood 98% of what you said (I guess), amazing isn't it?

Jason,

Yo debo
Tu debes
El debe
Nosotros, vosotros y ellos deben.

"No, Xatufan por supuesto que no. Como podrias pensar eso de mi? Te lo digo sinceramente. Sabes que, yo he notado que tu ortografia castellana es mejor que la mia."

That means "No, Xatufan, of course not. How could you think that of me? I'm telling you sincerely. Do you know that I've noticed that your Spanish ortography is better than mine".

Did you guess right, Nic?

I've got something that won't let me sleep! Is "perro" (dog in Spanish) a Basque word? I'd like that someone like Jordi answers this to me. Thank ye.

Xatufan, nic,

I also understood that correctly (without ever learning Spanish). So my plans to take up Spanish and use French as a help are not hopeless! :-)

Easterner, how can you understand that if you have never studied spanish? do you all think that spanish language is easy to understand and learn? do you think we speak faster comparing to others?

Miguel,

Of course I didn't say that I understand all Spanish without having studied it, but I do understand many words or shorter texts where the words are similar in form to French or Latin (it is simple deduction based on similarity of form, as I would call it). And sometimes when I stumble on a Spanish-speaking soap opera, I deliberately listen in, and often I can follow quite well what is being said (about 50-60 percent). That is partly because Spanish has a lot of words of Latin origin that differ systematically from the same words in English or French (such as seguridad-sécurité-security, soledad-solitude-solitude, decisión-décision-decision, naturalmente-naturellement-naturally, and many others), usually with the same or similar meaning. Actually I once translated an user instruction manual from Spanish to Hungarian and I had to look up only a few words in a dictionary. Of course this is about reading and listening comprehension, therefore receptive skills, and it requires systematic study to develop proper speaking or writing skills.

Actually what I like about learning Romance languages like French, Italian or Spanish is that a lot of grammatical forms are so good-sounding that they simply stick in your head. My favourites are verb forms (especially simple future), ever since I encountered "No pasarán" and others of the kind: "cantaremos", "quedó", "rumiando", etc. This gives a sheer beauty to language learning!

Xatufan:
I answered that elsewhere in another thread. "Perro" is an onomatopoeic sound "prr", which is the sound the dog makes. It comes from a pre-Roman language spoken in the Iberian peninsula. It is not Basque (Euskera) although Euskera is the only evolved pre-Roman language that is still spoken in Western Europe. It is argued if Euskera is related to the Iberian languages that were spoken in the Iberian peninsula before Latin replaced those languages although some toponomycal similarities have been found in places where Iberian languages were spoken before the arrival of the Romans. As you know three literary Romance languages have evolved in Spain from Latin. From east to west these are: Catalan, Castilian (Spanish), Portuguese (Galician or Gallego is very close to Portuguese since they were the same language in the Middle Ages.)

Yes, it's true. I asked the same question at the same time in another thread. That should have enlarged my probabilities of being answered.

Thank you, Jordi. By the way, what kind of dog says "prrr"??? A German Sheperd? A chihuahua? All the dogs I've heard say "Wof, wof" or something like that. :-)

By the way, Chihuahua is a name of a state (and its capital city) in Northern Mexico. It is near Ciudad Juárez (that city very close to the frontier)...

Maybe your dog is a wolf and this is why it says wof. Or maybe you have a Germanic dog or a happy dog. The "w" sound is not even Spanish (you say "vagón" and not "wagon". I imagine your Peruvian Spanish anglicised dog says: "bof, bof" since it wouldn't pronounce the "v" either and it would sound as "b". Your dog is a bit alien for a Spanish speaking one since he makes phonematic sounds that don't exist in Spanish.
Angry pre-Roman Iberian dogs said "prr, prr" specially if they caught you trying to steal their food ;-) "Muerde como un perro".

Xatufan,


a part "por supuesto que no" i understood all, por supuesto que no = "bien sur que non" in french.

A french dog, if you want to steal his food, will do "grrrrr", when he screams he does some : ouaf, ouaf!