"El año pasado conocí a mi novio". What does this mean?
"El año pasado conocí a mi novio." What does this mean? Last year I knew my boyfriend.???
4 Answers
the verb conocer in preterite changes the meaning and so it means here: I "met" instead of "to know". there are a few verbs that changes in the meaning in preterite.
Yes. I became familiar with, got acquainted, or I met my boyfriend.
Conocí mi esposa en 1957. I met my wife in 1957.Antes no la conocia Before that I didn't know her.
In the interests of completeness and precision, to say that the "meaning changes in the preterit" reflects the English speaker's point of view (for the Spanish speaker, what changes is the "temporal aspect" [as it does any time a different tense is used]). Because in English we consistently use different verbs ('knew'/'met' for 'conocer', 'knew'/'learned' for 'saber', etc.), we tend to think of them as meaning different things. For the Spanish speaker the difference is quite similar to the general distinction between the imperfect and the preterit (which, of course, causes English speakers no end of trouble).
About two years ago, we had a fairly lengthy debate in the forum about this very subject (Does the meaning change? [that was probably not the title of the thread but that was the general idea])
