Spanish language Q&A Forum

‘We had to play football without kneepads’ - in English  we say shin pads (UK) or shin guards (US). Knee pads are what you use for skating. SpanishDict is telling me shin guards are ‘espinilleras’, but I have no knowledge about about which is correct/if one word may be used in a certain country and another elsewhere etc

 I just wanted to add that it seems like a similar thing IS actually done in colloquial English in certain rare cases and the form and nuance is very similar--eg "they say it's tricky to learn" where the "they" is someone unspecified or people in general and not particularly relevant. (In more formal English, other ways of expressing the idea would sound less "colloquial", but it would  sound very normal in conversation.) But what I'm seeing is that in Spanish this has much broader use, and is quite natural in many cases where in english you'd have to use a passive construction (or another pronoun instead to keep the impersonal sense)--eg, "He was robbed," or maybe "someone robbed him", but not "they robbed him" because in English that implies subjects already mentioned or known and wouldn't sound impersonal (at least, not in any dialect I've encountered). Yet helpfully, the Spanish form isn't TOTALLY alien to an English speaker, just a lot more freely used. Gee, isn't language fun?! 🙃 

Él pudo irse de vacaciones

why we use 'irse' in this sentence? instead of 'ir'

The test question "I always wanted to be a dentist." I answered "he querido" but correct answer was "quise" 

Isn't that a past action that continues into the present? - perfecto?

Anyway this particular topic seems to be all over the place. The goal of these questions shouldn't be trickery IMHO. We're learning to speak a language - not to be a textbook scholar - or at least that's my goal. I asked one of the many Spanish speakers where I work what they thought and they said "it could be either and I'd understand you."

Below is the text from the lesson explaining your options with "por si/por si acaso". All of the examples use the imperfect subjective, but the fact that was the only option wasn't really clear until I read through the comments/questions.

From the Lesson: They introduce a subordinate clause expressing a condition. They can be followed by the subjunctive or the indicative.

¿Ambas son correctas?

1. Solo escuche como toco.

2. Solo escuche cómo toco.

 Gracias de antemano