Hi James,

You may run into problems if you had the ability to hide the hints because the past tenses can be tricky. For example:

"I went to the cinema" can be correctly translated as "He ido al cine," "Fui al cine" and "Iba al cine" depending on the time window / period in which the action occurred; for example: This week, last week, habitually - respectively for the above. The quiz questions sometimes include that piece of information (for example este semana, la semana pasada, every Saturday) but often they don't. I think they use the hint method because it steers us towards thinking in terms of those "time windows" when deciding which tense to use. It was only when I grasped this concept that the difference between the past tenses began to make a lot of sense - and the hints were invaluable.

Saludos. John

Hi John

after considering your reply to my post,“ it is time to take the training wheels off” , I have come to agree with you about the usefulness of the tips and hints. because our test questions are out of The context of actual life experience,  the hints are needed in certain specific cases 2 compensate for the lack of actual living context. So, I will use them when needed and ignore them when not needed. Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

James