I’ve been going through the SSI in Spanish challenges, and it’s an excellent course and everything, however I was wondering why the lessons use personal pronouns with verbs? I thought in Spanish that personal pronouns are not used in everyday speech, except for extra clarity or emphasis. They’re usually excluded by Spanish natives because you can tell by the ending of the verb which person the verb is referring to, for example ‘usted habla’ in everyday speech is just ‘habla’, ‘usted necesita’ is usually just ‘necesita’, etc.
I’m not knocking the course at all, I just think it’d sound more natural to not use the personal pronouns as they’re not really used in natural Spanish conversation much, so if people get into the habit of using them all the time it would lead to them sounding a little unnatural perhaps. Was there a reason they were put in?
I don’t know about the course, but as a native of a sister-language, Italian, I can tell that English native speakers often have the impression that we don’t use pronouns in everyday speech. But we do! There’s a whole lot of situations when you’re going to need them. And I would add, especially as a learner, because conjugations are a bit of a mess - unlike Welsh (oooh, how I love this, of Welsh language!) - and sometimes that can really help other people understand.
I never said that personal pronouns are never used in everyday speech…but the fact is, they are omitted a lot in everyday conversation in both Spanish and Italian. That is why in most Spanish or Italian language courses and grammar books this point is taught. I think it would be helpful to mention this in the SSI Spanish course, so that learners don’t mistakenly believe that personal pronouns are always used and don’t get into the habit of using them all the time.
Je vais commencer à apprendre l’espagnol avec the application SSiS aussitôt que possible.
Dw i isio parlare italiano, hefyd.
parlare italiano
aussi, hefyd, freisin, auch, italiano italiano italiano
(Dw i wedi anghofio fy iodaleg i)
Ich werde, ich würde gern meine Sprachkenntnisse üben, in all’ den Sprachen, die ich schon lange nicht, oder nicht mehr so oft, gesprochen habe, nicht so oft wie, ich hätte gerne, sei der Fall/soll der Fall gewesen sein.
Duolingo scored my Italian last year more highly than my French or German, but not so highly as my Irish, in which ironically I can currently say not a word!
And that is despite currently participating in, still working through material from the Future Learn UCD Irish 101 / 102 course.
Welsh from SSiW just dominates my brain.
Sometimes I resent it. Damn you, @aran and your hocus-pocus!
(meant nicely, honest, you evil maniac, you!)
We’ve tried to mix and match as far as possible - to use some with and some without - and then (as ever) to avoid getting caught up in grammatical explanations, because we believe that fine-tuning like that works far, far better when people get themselves into regular conversations and start to pick up the habits of the people they speak to most often…
Hi there, native Spanish speaker here. Spanish can at times be more “pro-drop” than Italian. But I’ve had a bit of a look at the course as I’m helping a couple of friends to learn. From what I’ve seen, pronoun use in the course is actually fairly natural. You will notice that it is most likely to be used when using Usted. This is fairly common because the conjugation is most often the same as el/ella, so the pronoun is often kept to remove ambiguity. In fact a bit like in Korean mythology (the theme of returning to the beginning), in Spanish beginners often use too many pronouns, intermediates rarely use them and advanced start using them more again to sound more native.
