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Funny, I am Spanish and I just realised how confusing the verb 'to feel' can be. The app translated it to 'sentirse', and I didn't do it correctly. Just after
by Philomath 9y ago
Funny, I am Spanish and I just realised how confusing the verb 'to feel' can be.
The app translated it to 'sentirse', and I didn't do it correctly. Just after that I found the error.
'To feel' can be translated to 'sentir' or to 'sentirse' and both are correct depending on the context. 'To feel the wind' would be 'sentir el viento', but 'to feel bad' would be 'sentirse mal'. I conjugated 'sentir' and it was asking for 'sentirse'.
- edko 9y agoI don't think there is anything special about the verb "sentir". "Sentirse" is just using it in a reflexive way, and the same holds for many other verbs: acostar, cepillar, duchar, levantar, etc.
- solipsism 9y agoWas going to say exactly this. Nothing out of the ordinary here. OP appears bilingual but must not spend much time translating between languages. You will face such problems (maybe they can be thought of as an example of an impedence mismatch [0]) whenever going between languages, especially when you're crossing language families. [0] http://wiki.c2.com/?ImpedanceMismatch http://wiki.c2.com/?ImpedanceMismatch
- mattbgates 9y agoSaber vs. Conocer. Always had fun with that one in Spanish class.
- titanomachy 9y agoI think Germanic languages might be the outlier here, every other language that I've encountered uses a distinct verb for "to know (a person)" vs "to know (a fact)". connaitre/savoir (French), gnorizo/xero (Greek), renshi/zhidao (Mandarin).
- Vivtek 9y agoOr in fact, German kennen/wissen - it's not Germanic languages per se, but English, which developed from a simplified creole spoken by the Saxon conquerors of the Angles (they never bothered with all that conjugation stuff, and it stuck).
- barry-cotter 9y agoJust checked whether Dutch distinguishes between kennen and wissen. It doesn't, exactly like English, same for Norwegian and Swedish. That suggests it's a West Germanic thing. While English can fairly be described as a creole it's the influence of Norman French on Old English that makes that a fair description. Old English was IIRC on a dialect continuum between Frisian and Norse.
- harperlee 9y agoI will always remember the puzzlement of the whole class when my EGB grammar teacher wrote the following sentence in the board for syntactic analysis: Dímelo.
- kmicklas 9y agoWhat's so puzzling about that?
- nandemo 9y agoPresumably it's the fact that syntactic analysis involves assigning parts of speech and function to tokens, which in English and Spanish are usually words separated by spaces: Say it to me V Pronoun Preposition Pronoun \/ \/ VP PP But "dímelo" is just one word. You need to tokenize it into "dí me lo" before parsing, and presumably that's not immediately obvious to kids. Another example, this time from formal Portuguese: Falar-lhe-ei Lit: Tell-him-[I will]
- harperlee 9y agoExactly. Sorry for the level of detail for the non-spanish speakers, but I was on mobile. Such "onewordness" is not universal, though, it's just usage (as you could see "goal keeper" evolving into "goal-keeper" and then just "goalkeeper") For example, if you insist on requesting "Dímelo", you might say, "¿Me lo dices?", which, by jumping from exhortation to questioning, splits the word. And in general, although "decirse" and "decirlo" might be treated as infinitive, the verb is actually "decir", and no dictionary will treat them as separate verbs.
- pvaldes 9y agoJust for the record, 'sentir' is related with outer. You use it to explain that you perceive something that is out of you (like in I feel the wind) 'sentirse' (and other form verbs that fit in "something-something" + se) is related with inner. You use it to explain something about you (i.e your mood). Perceive something inside the limits of your body (like in I feel ill). Is not an exact rule (I feel pain uses sentir for example) but is useful.