vence

I thought vincit was used in the sense of "conquers" (as in "Love conquers all" &c.)

It is.

vencer: to defeat, win, conquer.

So you just want a closer match to the word for translation? I can relate to that.

I just said the first thing I, with my limited vocabulary, could think of.

It’s also the more common of the two words.

That’s fine: you would have been understood.

It has a bit of taint though in las Américas for obvious reasons. :)

Yes.

Even that great Conquistador, Julius Caesar, used vencer. :)

What a happy owl that is!

After I've done a few more days of practice I will go and take their comprehensive test. Then, later on, after reading Borges as best I can, I'll take it again and compare.

In all, the course took me only ~7 weeks

Still, much of the latter material is not yet locked in, and won't be till it's been repeated a few times.

Y me imagino que no sabes cuántas palabras sabes en este momento.

@Robusto congratulation!

Un brindis!

@MattE.Эллен Gracias.

tries to think of a sentences using all those

a	Preposition	an hour ago
abandonar	Verb	5 days ago
abierta	Adjective	17 hours ago
abiertas	Adjective	3 weeks ago
abierto	Adjective	2 weeks ago
abiertos	Adjective	2 weeks ago
abogada	Noun	1 month ago
abogado	Noun	1 month ago
abogados	Noun	1 month ago
abre	Verb	1 month ago
abren	Verb	1 month ago
abrigo	Noun	1 month ago
abrigos	Noun	1 month ago
abril	Noun	1 month ago
abrió	Verb	1 week ago
abrir	Verb	6 days ago
abro	Verb	1 month ago
absolutamente	Adverb	1 month ago
abuela	Noun	1 month ago
abuelo	Noun	1 month ago

Some of their time estimates are faulty. I know I've done abuelo more recently than a month ago.

Yo no sabía que tuvieses nietos.

Why does chat let you post a humongous list like this, but tell you you've posted too much text if it's all as one paragraph? Hmm, maybe they only count consecutive words before a line break.

They count consecutive 16-bit code units.

@tchrist No las tengo.

¿Y de nietos? :)

Las would only cover nietas. :)

The 1575 number is inflated, since they list different forms of the same word as individual words.

@tchrist No los tengo?

@Robusto Eso ya lo vi.

@Robusto Sí.

That’s accusative doubling, which is mandatory when the DO precedes the subject.

Spanish uses alternation in standard word order as a way of placing emphasis on the moved-around word much much more often than we do.

I could have said "ya vi eso" to say “I already saw that”, but "Eso ya lo vi" really is “That I already saw.”

Of course, there are a million other verbs than ver I could have used there, but few so short. :)

"Ya me di cuenta de eso" => I already realized that.

I’m trying to think. You’re in Boston. There may be authentic Spanish-run tapas bars there.

I can see grass on the sunny hillsides now, although it will be a week or more before the drifts in the north shadow behind my house manage, even if we keep up with this sixty stuff.

I have a stone wall in the front facing south near the public sidewalk, and some of the snow there has melted free and let the crocuses pop up again.

The sun is more powerful here at this altitude. The difference in latitude isn’t enough to account for it.

So the stone wall acts like a heat reservoir for the full southern sun all afternoon, and it helps things along.

@Robusto For the past subjunctive, it’s okay if you always use only the -ra forms. Just be aware that the -se form also exist.

With the auxiliary verbs, for some reason there is a tendency when you are being polite to use the -ra forms as polite conditionals instead of the actual conditional inflections. Consider the gradations in ¿Quieres un café? to ¿Querrías un café? to ¿Quisieras un café? The simple present is a bit direct.

@tchrist OK.

Besides quisiera for querría, they also do that with debiera, pudiera, hubiera instead of debría, podría, habría. The true conditionals are always still correct, but using -ra forms feels a bit more polite. It is at least very common. The Spanish are more polite than we are.

@tchrist Seven tapas bars in greater Boston.

@Robusto Ah, but you have to find ones run but Spaniards. :)

Sounds like a chore.

No, a culinary adventure!

Dammit... reminded to do chores

Ha, they're all in Somerville, Cambridge, and the trendy spots in Boston. Why am I not surprised?

When I lived in Madrid as a student, there were so many Chinese restaurants that we would go to a new one each day ordering only a spring roll and hot and sour soup, to judge whether it was good enough that we should come back for the full meal.

@Robusto you've graduated to the point where you can do work for them.

@Mitch I already do work for free here, so . . .

@Robusto Boston is surely in greater Boston, verdad?

Most eating establishments offer a "full meal" for a few specials of the day, consisting of your choice of first plate, second plate, café o vino, y postre, from a limited selection. At Chinese restaurants, the first plate was always either spring roll or soup.

Actually, it's less than free when you take into account dealing with idiots. But I repeat myself. All work involves dealing with idiots.

I wouldn't even know what to order from a Spanish menu. All the Spanish restaurants I've been to are really Mexican.

People are idiots

Also, and this is weird, in Spain they will not blink an eye if you ask for un vaso de agua or even una jarrafa de agua. In Germany and France and Switzerland and Belgium, you have to beg and plead for them to serve you tapwater.

Just don’t expect to get a mountain of ice with it. You will get some, though.

At least in the summer.

Jarrafa is carafe. It’s obviously cognate.

Or jar + carafe, something like that.

@tchrist Yes, I noticed that. I usually drank wine or beer, or coffee in the morning.

One does not drink beer or wine with breakfast. One drinks brandi. :)

It is not odd for old guys to get a shot of brandy or anisette with their café.

@tchrist Plus de café, s'il vous plait.

Oh, do you know how to order coffee in Spain?

I mean, the names for the kinds?

No.

I know espresso.

Café solo means coffee alone, so no milk.

They only serve espresso.

Café con leche is with a lot of milk, and tends to be for breakfast especially.

Café con leche?

Café con leche en el lado?

Café solo is served in a demitasse, café con leche in a regular-sized cup.

I like a little cream, and prefer to add it myself.

Just enough to take the acid edge off.

Okay, then you want un café manchado.

It’s a cortado that’s been “stained” with a touch of milk to take the edge of.

But I do want a big cuppa.

That you ask for un manchado doble.

I hate the little demitasses, unless I'm having coffee after dinner.

Agree.

I always ordered un solo doble or un manchado doble.

Would they understand Café con leche en el lado as "coffee with milk on the side"?

Dan Bron is the new FumbleFingers.

If you’re at a bar — bars open to serve coffee in the morning — you might say:

The last one is gimme one alone, which means one coffee no milk.

They always give you sugar on the side.

You use poner at a bar, often enough.

@tchrist uno solo?

Yeah, it’s an odd use.

Normally uno shortens to un.

But it doesn’t have a noun following it, so becomes a pronoun.

Meaning one.

They do not use uno very much as an impersonal pronoun, although they can. It sounds Frenchified though.

Póngame uno solo => "Put me one alone." So gimme one (coffee) without milk.

Sólo means only and doesn’t agree since its an adverb. Solo means alone and since it is an adjective, would agree.

The accent mark is not strictly observed by casual writers, but the agreement of course is.

The full adjective is solamente but that’s too long for a simple word.

@tchrist Oh, I was parsing solo as a noun there. Me and my English habits.

Still water. I see.

Bottles of water are either con gas for sparking or sin gas for still.

And they will always ask you if you don't specify. Always. :)

Whereas un vaso de aqua will be tap water.

Now, this is important. You must pronounce un vaso as though it were spelled umbaso.

Same with "un vino": the n becomes m because of the consonant following, and you get a hard B there because of the nasal in front of it.

But I think we already talked about how all nasals assimilate to whatever sound follows.

@tchrist I will note that.

> Con los verbos querer, haber, deber, poder y valer es frecuente el empleo de la forma en –ra sustituyendo en el verbo principal a los condicionales simple (-ría) y compuesto (habría ...), así como al presente de indicativo sin cambio de significado.

That's the quisiera, pudiera, debiera thing for politeness.

It just means conditional, not past subjunctive, when used in a request especially.

@Robusto The English have a notoriously difficult time ordering water in America, and vice versa. It isn’t quite that bad, but it will mark you as having a horrible accent if you don’t do it.

Basically, connected speech sounds different from words in isolation, but learners don’t know to do that, and so they sound bad, bad enough that it will confuse native speakers.

So un machado doble tends to be umachao doble in rapid speech. It is considered "habla que no es culta" to turn -ado into -ao, but EVERYBODY AT ALL LEVELS does this when speaking quickly. Or they lessen the soft th so much you do not perceive it as an American.

In Andalucía (especially, but everywhere really), they even make -ado into -au, but that is considered poorly spoken: vowels aren’t supposed to reduce. This is not Portuguese.

If anyone is dying to know how many people bowled at least once in the United States during 2009, the answer is 44,972.

that doesn't seem like very many

Kan de beste overkomen.

@MattE.Эллен I agree.

[In thousands (269,988 represents 269,988,000). Data are based on a questionnaire mailed to 10,000 households. The questionnaire asked the male and female heads of households and up to two other household members who were at least seven years of age to indicate their age, the sports in which they participated in 2009, and the number of days of participation in 2009.

A participant is defined as an individual seven years of age or older who participates in a sport more than once a year. See source for methodology]

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 exhales finally

@Robusto TIL how to search the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 You are a gentlewoman and a scholar.

@MattE.Эллен Half of those were probably The Dude anyway.

@tchrist BTW, I downloaded Ficciones to my Kindle.

amazon.com/Ficciones-Spanish-Edition-Jorge-Borges-ebook/dp/…

@Robusto Don't be fatuous, Rob.

You mean coitus?

approximately 2045744 people went bowling in the UK last weekend (extrapolation from the ratio of the number of people I know to the number of people I know who went bowling)

@Robusto In the parlance of our times, yes.

BTW, @cornbread, the Bowling Hall of Fame is in St. Louis. It shows you how starved we were for something to do in St. Louis that we actually visited there.

@Robusto Sheesh.

St. Louis is okay if you don't need a lot of stimulation from your environment.

Oh, wait.

So it's really 44,972 * 1000.

oh!

that makes more sense

Yes!

Yeah. I mean, people probably debate typefaces more often than 44,972 times per year.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 So you learned to search the Statistical Abstract of the United States, you just didn't learn how to interpret the results of your search.

Although I think you have fixed the problem.

@Robusto So you know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold it.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 And isn't that really the most important part?

OK, now see if you can figure out what the per capita beer consumption of the United States would be if nobody could bowl.

would it go up or down?

Unknown.

We're waiting for @cornbread to do the math.

/r/theydidthemath

/r/theydidthemonstermath

/r/itcaughtoninaflath

And now, a song for @cornbread's foray into statistics:

You will learn how to interpret statistics just from listening to that one song.

drummer sings right?

Hi

guys

a quick question

What's the best strategy to master a new second language?

What's the English for "preuve par récurrence"? induction proof or recurrence proof?

@Noah Maybe just do like Robusto: duolingo

@Noah have one of your parents be fluent and only speak that to you or move to a new country... at age no later than ~10.

Oh. You mean right now?

Well, the same, but moving to the country and immersing yourself is probably the more practical option. Your parents may not understand the other request.

Oh. You can't move? TV and movies and youtube and duolingo to start!!

Where'd all the gravatars go?

@Rob Metric Alphabet.

@Robusto You don’t have one on the left, I don’t have on the right. It’s been like this for a few days now.

It was the Grapture. If you don't see yours, it's in greaven.

Is "Leitmotif" only a musical term, or is it related with motivation?

Hmm, it's more a motif

I was going to employ it wrongly...