How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

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emk
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1734
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:07 pm
Location: Vermont, USA
Languages: English (N), French (B2+)
Badly neglected "just for fun" languages: Middle Egyptian, Spanish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=723
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby emk » Sun May 05, 2024 2:32 am

Ah, a fun puzzle. From French, I know about "se" as réflexive, and even "se" as a passive-like construction. (This is why learning a second Romance language hopelessly contaminates my entire experiment's data. :lol:)

But I've been seeing "se" used for some other stuff in Spanish, which I've never looked up. And I finally got severely puzzled by the sentence no se lo puedes decir a la reina. So I asked ChatGPT 4, which is actually quite good at explaining how a confusing sentence works, and cross-checked with Google.

It turns out that se is an indirect object pronoun! So this means "you can't tell it to her, the queen", complete with a nicely doubled indirect object. And doubling like this appears in many forms in French!

I think one thing that really helps people get the most out of input-heavy methods is the ability to say, "Huh, that's weird. I did not expect to see that word there." You don't always need to look up the answer like I did here, but it's good to at least note something unexpected is happening.

And yeah, I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other things like this. It happens.
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