"mejor que me vaya vs mejor que me voy"

Question

I'm watching Revolutionary Road in Spanish and I've heard people use both,

"Mejor que me vaya"

and

"Mejor que me voy"

I was wondering what the difference was. The second option using indicative sounds to me a lot firmer. Like, I'm definitly going, whereas the first option with subjunctive could be more like a suggestion?

Anybody else have any thoughts on what both could mean?

Answer 1

Easy: the first one is correct; the second one is plain wrong, grammatically speaking. If you heard someone who calls himself Spanish native speaker, better don't learn Spanish from them, because anyone who speaks normal Spanish will correct you right away if you say such thing.

However, you can use indicative by saying: Mejor me voy. Despite their similarities, this is a completely different sentence.

Answer 2

"However, you can use indicative by saying: Mejor me voy. Despite their similarities, this is a completely different sentence."

So what would 'mejor me voy' mean different from "mejor que me vaya"?

Answer 3

So what would 'mejor me voy' mean different from "mejor que me vaya"?

Sorry, what I meant to say is that the syntactic structure of "Mejor que me voy" (a wrong sentence) and "Mejor me voy" are quite different.

"Mejor me voy" simply means "I'm leaving" plus this "mejor", which is like "better" or "rather". "Mejor que me vaya" is a comment about what you think it would be best, instead of the announcement given with the indicative version (ie. I'm leaving).

Answer 4

So what would 'mejor me voy' mean different from "mejor que me vaya"?

The meaning itself is not different.

Será mejor que me vaya..... Mejor....me voy.......

Pronounced with an open ending, sort of, has mainly the same meaning.

Welcome to the forum redsox, I have not seen you before

Answer 5

I sure wish you guys could translate everything that's spanish, so i can learn. So i'm taking a guess it says, it's better i should go/leave. Yes i know i can click on the word, it's just learning to speak/write spanish correctly.

thanks