Spanish language Q&A Forum

How come for certain reflexive verbs we use le instead of se? For example Él le gusta la chaqueta. The jacket is pleasing to him. 

¿Cuántos euros te quedan en la cartera? -Me quedan ochenta.
How many euros do you have left in your purse? -I have eighty left. 

The above is using preterite translated to present perfect. This is a subject I have some trouble understanding. Wondering if quedar is one of those examples of language that doesn't translate exactly and have to accept it as an expression used and not over think it?

Hello lovely people, it's Friday which means we get a new set of weekend workouts, literally my best part of the week.

Inma, I love the dictations, even though I'm not very good at them yet, however I have two general questions about them, and wondered if you could help.
1. Vocabulary - When I listen to lessons, even lessons A1, I encounter vocabulary that I don't know. When the dictacions are written, are you using this as an opportunity to expand our vocabulary, or are you writing within what you expect us to know?  I don't mind which, I just wondered if my vocab is weak.  I use it as a learning opportunity!

2. English translation - I believe that the dictations are the only place where we don't see an English translation of what was said / written. Is this intentional? As per my point above, I sometimes don't know the words even when they are written, and I use SpanishDict to translate.  This has some disadvantages, for example in today's A1 exercise, Spanishdict translated "partes" meant as anywhere in your text, to "private parts", as in on a human :-)
Thanks, now back to work.

Imagino que vosotros ________ la verdad. I imagine that you had told the truth.HINT: Conjugate "decir" in El Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto

Imagining always takes the indicative, or is this case specific?

Thanks.

I thought it should have been una reunión de negocias but that was marked as incorrect. Is it always the case that a noun modifying another noun comes in its original form or is it a special case for "negocios"?

Hello,

I'm just wondering about the use of the reflexive comprarse.  It is used in this example:

En esta tienda pueden comprarse unas joyas muy bonitas.You can buy very nice jewels in this shop
Why is the reflexive used here, and in general when do we use comprarse instead of comprar?
Thanks!Marcos

I [incorrectly] made "mejor" plural - to agree with "they" - by writing: "Eran aún mejores que en mis sueños". [Or could it also be correct with "mejores"?]

Perhaps we have to regard "mejor" as an adverb here, not as an adjective - so we should not make it plural - despite the fact that (in English) it looks like a complement of the verb "eran".

My grammar book (by Butt and Benjamin) seems to confirm that^ by giving the example "Aquí estamos mejor" = "We're better [off] here".

It seems that we need to be careful in deciding whether a particular word in Spanish should be treated as an adverb rather than an adjective. In particular, we should avoid the temptation of trying to judge it according to its grammatical context in English. [A well known example of that, is of course "Está bien"].

I learned naranja as the fruit and anaranjado/a as the color.  Obviously language can be used differently throughout the Spanish-speaking communities! Is that the case here?