quote:

Originally posted by Capitalizt "no fuimos all mall el sabado" This literally seems to translate to "No, we were at the mall on saturday" so the "no" is at the beginning instead of the end..but I think my question stands. Do you have any way of saying "We weren't there" or "We didn't do it".. Or are you instead forced to say the entire sentence in positive terms while simply adding a no at the beginning or end to reverse the meaning?

haha its to make you be patient:

it was the bizarre thing about japanese as well: You make a statement, then affirm or deny it at the end... In Jap its to do with grammar and sentence structure, not sure about spanish, but you end your sentence with a positive or a negative phrase

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quote:

Originally posted by Capitalizt "no fuimos all mall el sabado" This literally seems to translate to "No, we were at the mall on saturday" so the "no" is at the beginning instead of the end..but I think my question stands. Do you have any way of saying "We weren't there" or "We didn't do it".. Or are you instead forced to say the entire sentence in positive terms while simply adding a no at the beginning or end to reverse the meaning?

Le me just correct something: though Spanish makes no distinction between the words "no" and "not", that word does work like the word "not" in that case, exactly the way you think it should. The full sentence WhooCares provided is (I believe):

"(No, nosotros) no fuimos al mall"
(No, we) NOT go.we.PAST TO.THE mall

However, your question still is an interesting one because it probably does feel like everything in Spanish is backwards for an English speaker and vice-versa, until you study a language like Japanese that is completely opposite of what Spanish is like, making English not that much of an opposition. And, in Brazilian Portuguese, I'd naturally end the sentence with the negation, depending on the stress:

"A gente foi pro shopping não"
THE people go.PAST TO.THE mall NOT

(yeah, we just say "the people" for "we")

And I just woke up and I can't be arsed to write a concluding paragraph to make this a coherent whole.

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Last edited by Lira on Dec-29-2010 at 12:15

quote:

Originally posted by Lira And, Watts, you want to learn, like more than one language in the same family? (e.g. Italian & French at the same time?)

Yes. Exactly like that.

quote:

Originally posted by Capitalizt "no fuimos all mall el sabado" This literally seems to translate to "No, we were at the mall on saturday" so the "no" is at the beginning instead of the end..but I think my question stands. Do you have any way of saying "We weren't there" or "We didn't do it".. Or are you instead forced to say the entire sentence in positive terms while simply adding a no at the beginning or end to reverse the meaning?

you shouldn't do literal translation of languages. you will only feck things up.


El sabado no fuimos al centro comercial.
No fuimos al centro comercial el sabado.
no, fuimos al centro comercial el sabado = no, we went to the mall on saturday. (this becomes an affirmative sentence because of where the comma is located.)

no estabamos ahí = we weren't there
nosotros no lo hicimos = we didn't do it
no lo hicimos = we didn't do it. the 'we' is understood in the plural form of the verb hacer

best of luck in learning spanish....correctly.

Last edited by daydreamer on Dec-29-2010 at 23:41

is it really possible to learn another language, by just reading about it online, and using those programs like the rosetta stone?

what daydreamer post is pretty spot on

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quote:

Originally posted by Lira lolwut! It's funny because I've got this book and the words "trance" and "addict" are nowhere to be found

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That's awesome. You must be proud in a nerdy kind of way.

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LOL!

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quote:

Originally posted by Swamper

I just found out there are some pages missing in the pdf file I have of this book (which I used to search for the words). Inspired by this, I decided to do some more research and see if no other author mentioned this... and, look what I found:



Just a footnote (#16 in case you can't find it), and it's the very same sentence, but here's tranceaddict in yet another linguistics book! We're famous! Or, rather, Pumaz is

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So TA has poor language skills... LOL.