muripic

radin (stingy)

My name is Muriel, and I'm from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I studied Linguistics at university because I love learning languages. I'm currently trying to improve my French (trying to get past that annoying intermediate plateau) and starting to learn German. But as I'm very busy at the time it's hard to find motivation, so I thought that sharing the process would help I work as a Spanish teacher and sometimes also as an English teacher and translator. Nice to meet you all!

You should also be careful with the word "excited", because in Spanish it usually means "sexually aroused". It can also be used to refer to a child who's having bursts of activity (maybe after eating too much sugar), but that meaning is not very frequent. I've seen many funny misunderstandings with this one

Prepositions are crazy, and they vary tremendously between languages. Actually, is one of the hardest things to master and even native speakers make mistakes. That being said, what I always tell my students is to learn words with their prepositions included, as English students do with phrasal verbs. For example, if you remember that "near" is always "cerca de" when placed before a noun, everything should turn out to be a bit easier. The same goes for verbs (such as soñar con, depender de, consistir en, and so on. Good luck!

The infinitive in Spanish is tricky because in English it's used in a different way... I think that the most effective way to learn it is to learn verb phrases (in Spanish, perífrasis o frases verbales). For example: After tener que, deber, poder, querer, ir a, empezar a, terminar de and many others, you should always use the infinitive. Some examples: Tengo que estudiar. Debes llamar a tu padre. Terminamos de comer a las ocho. But there are some verbs that require a gerund, such as continuar, seguir, andar, estar. English speakers usually say "continuar a hacer", while the correct phrase would be "continuar haciendo". Some examples of this would be: Seguí estudiando durante dos años más. ¿Qué andas haciendo estos días? There are more complicated cases. If you post some of your mistakes maybe I can be more specific, but in the meantime I hope this helps!