Questions using "puedes"?
I have a very long list of questions and a lot of the questions use puedes when asking the question "Can you/I...". Then I see some that ask the same thing but do not use "puedes", very confusing. Is there a simple way to distinguish whether or not to use "puedes or puedo"?
For example: Can you switch off the light? = ¿Puedes apagar la luz? {used} Can you do me a favor? = ¿Me haces un favor? {not used}
Gracias
3 Answers
I think we treat can, may, might, would you (and other auxiliary verbs in general) exactly the same way in English. We drop them without changing the meaning of the sentence or use can (to be able) when we mean (would you?)
This use or omission of Puedes should sound very familiar to an English speaker's ear.
Can you do me a favor? rather than Do me a favor? sounds a little more polite as we usually consider more grammatically correct English to be more polite that our lazy, everyday conversational syntax.
Can you do me a favor? rather than Do me a favor? sounds a little more polite as we usually consider more grammatically correct English to be more polite that our lazy, everyday conversational syntax.
Again, we have the literal translation and the way we normally speak in conflict. If I was asked to translate "Can you do me a favor?" into spanish, I would have written "¿Puedes me haces un favor?". The above translation was from my flashcard web site and so many of the sentences are not literally translated so that you have to just "know" the correct way one would say it in spanish. Really hard to learn this stuff.
It´s easy, in that kind of questions (can you do me a favor, switch off the light, pass me the salt, etc) if you don't put the "can you ", you would be giving an order, and as the guys above wrote , that wouldn't be polite.
and other thing
Can you do me a favor = ¿Me puedes hacer un favor? not ¿me haces un favor?
