First of all, many thanks everyone.
Cifi wrote: ↑Sun Jan 22, 2023 6:35 pm
I think that one of the most misleading "rules" is that repeated actions would require imperfect tense.
This isn't quite the way it works as far as I can tell, it's whether there is a determined start and end point of something rather, plus whether it matters to the speaker.
The problem is that the sentence doesn't give a start or end point, just that it's asking whether the writing was a common event.
Overall, imperfect vs preterite is the hardest part of Spanish grammar in my opinion. I found subjunctive actually mostly easy to cope with in comparison.
When it comes to the subjunctive, I can usually manage English into Spanish, but unless it's a conditional + 'si' sentence (which is structured the same way in English) I have terrible trouble going the other way.
For imperfect v. preterite however, I wonder if I'll ever finish grasping that.
I mean, even ones that should be obvious, like, 'sabía' means 'I knew' while 'supe' means something like 'I became aware of', but I don't know whether that's 'I knew' in the sense of 'Of course I knew that - I've known it since I was six!' or 'I'm sure I knew that once, but I've forgotten it.' or even 'I knew that then, but I've since forgotten it', or any combination thereof.
gmads wrote: ↑Mon Jan 23, 2023 10:44 pm
Jimbo wrote: ↑Sun Jan 22, 2023 9:04 am
"Did you write to them often?"
Duolingo sentence discussion: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/27836741
Default translation: ¿Les escribiste a menudo?
My answer (marked also correct): ¿Les escribías a menudo?
I just don't understand the default answer though - when would you pair a preterite conjugation like 'escribiste' with 'a menudo'? I must be missing something somewhere.
A question first. Do you see any problem with the English sentence, "did you write to them often?" when compared to "did you used to write to them often?"
Yes, the general rule says that the imperfect is the preferred tense when describing repeated, habitual actions in the past (regardless of specific time frames: "ella solía llegar tarde"; "ella siempre solía llegar tarde"), and that the preterite is mainly used to describe single completed actions within a specific time frame ("el mes pasado fui al cine con mi novia").
Honestly, I do see, well, maybe not a problem but a clear difference between "did you write to them often?" and "did you used to write to them often?".
In the case of 'Did you write to them often?', whether the writing to them is continuing is outside the scope of the question while 'Did you used to write to them often?' is a form which is a near exact equivalent of the past perfect 'Had you written to them often?' - 'used to' means that the action is definitely no longer happening.
Given that everything I know about the imperfect tense in Spanish states that it cannot carry an ending (that would make it, by definition, perfective), I would think it unwise to translate 'Did you used to write to them often' as '¿Les escribías a menudo?', at least if there weren't any other qualifiers, but the question posed was 'Did you write to them often?', and while that might not be as clear about an action continuing into the present as the present perfect 'Have you written to them often?', it doesn't explicitly say it's ended either. I thought when beginning and endings were irrelevant in Spanish that the imperfect was the default go-to even without the 'often' in there?
However, sometimes the preterite may also be used for repeated actions within a time frame ("el mes pasado fui tres veces al cine"), even if it is implied ("el mes pasado me inscribí a un nuevo gimnasio; también fui tres veces al cine").
What time frame though (even implicit)?
It's always best to follow the general rules, and to gradually start taking note of the exceptions
The first of those forum examples only has one person ask about tenses, and nobody answered. The main discussion there was the absence of the indirect object preposition. Here's a detail their discussion didn't include however.
While to someone Stateside, that would be understood as 'Did you write [something] [to] him every day?', to my English eyes, while I understood it after a moment, I first read it as 'Did you write him {an already established male fictional character*} every day?' and now I'm wondering if it could translate it into Spanish, with that exact meaning, as '¿Lo escribías** todos los días?'?
*Possibly with a daily release schedule like a newspaper comic strip but that's not necessary because the point is about 'you' writing it every day, not the publication.
**Or 'escribiste'.
In the second forum example, quite a few of the commentators seem to agree with me, and someone even takes the time to explain why 'used to' is a really bad marker for the imperfect tense.
Although, now that I think about it, I have seen the imperfect tense used to refer to interrupted actions, the problem is that all the examples that I've seen of that use 'when' rather than 'but then', 'but now', 'until' or 'before', which is what 'used to' would require, and furthermore, don't actually indicate that the interrupted action was stopped so much as faded into the background (that part might just be a fault of Spanishdict's example sentences however).
Once again, I feel like I've somehow managed to learn something and simultaneously been left with yet more questions.