Leaderboard

As an Spanish I must admit I'm not very familiar to how you learn our grammar and the terms "present progressive" and "regular present" were complete strangers to me until 2 minutes ago that I googled it. If I'm not mislead you ask for the difference between "Andar/Ando" and "Andando" Well it's pretty much the same as "I walk" and "I am walking" The regular present is used for daily basis actions or general expressions that are "commonly true". For example: Yo ando todos los días para ir a clase. The present progressive is used to express and action that is taking place in that exact moment. For example: Ahora mismo estoy andando para ir a clase. Hope this helps, though I know I'm kinda late to answer and probably you sorted it out long ago

Interestingly enough, a few weeks ago, I came across an article that addresses this topic. It was originally published by BBCMundo and then it was replicated by the Colombian magazine "Semana". It could provide you with some complementary and useful information on the matter; additional to the valuable and relevant information that other members of this community have already shared with us in this thread. http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-40643378 http://www.semana.com/educacion/articulo/signos-de-interrogacion-y-admiracion-en-espanol/541754 The article provides some history and context about how we ended up using "opening" (I guess you call them "inverted") question and exclamation marks in Spanish. By the way, did you know that exclamation marks were previously called "admiration marks" in Spanish (signos de admiración)? As the author mentions in the article, the official name change from "signos de admiración" to "signos de exclamación" is really recent (2014). Anyway, as you already know, it is grammatically incorrect not to use them and be also aware that even native speakers of Spanish tend to leave them out both in formal and in informal writing. I myself, being a native speaker of Spanish, try to correct my colleagues and friends whenever they omit them and I always use opening / inverted question and exclamation marks even if I am just chatting by Skype or Whatsapp. P.S. If you happen to have trouble understanding some of the expressions or context contained in the article or if you have any question about it, I would be happy to to try to clarify them to you.

Hi there, everyone! Hope I can offer some help as a native speaker of Spanish. Not using the symbol ¿ to open a question is always a mistake. You'll always find it in official documents, textbooks, letters and so on. It is true, though, that due to the influence of English you'll see a lot of people writing things like "Qué tal?" in chats, whatsapp and the internet in general. It is a common use, but it's incorrect. Some of you were also saying that it looks weird to have the symbol ¿, but it's necessary in Spanish, a language with extremely long sentences sometimes. I'll try to give you an example: "Aunque tengas dinero y tengas muchísimas ganas de irte a París con tus amigos de la universidad, ¿no crees que deberías pensar en tu familia e irte con ellos de vacaciones?" In English, for example, the question would start with "don't you think...", that is, a change in the order of words that indicates the beginning of a question. However, in Spanish we don't change the order of words, so you may not realize someone's asking a question until you reach the end of such a long sentence. If you're reading out loud it's weird, because if you don't see the ¿ or it's not written, you'll need to go back and read the sentence again to change the intonation.

Think in terms of Your and You: This is your chair: Esta es tu silla. You are my hero: Tú eres mi héroe In theory, and probably in ancient Spanish this was true, the pronunciation was different, nowadays you simply add the accent to differentiate two words that look the same but have different meanings.