tantos/comparison question

Question

We're doing tan + como comparisons, and me and my teacher had a little disagreement over one of my sentences. "La chica tanta sabe como el chico." Something does look wrong, but the English translation for these comparisons seems like it would make it mostly correct. I changed it to, "La chica encanta tanta los juguetes como el chico." Is this correct? What about the previous?

Answer 1

I am a little confused because your two sentences are so different from one another. Here are my suggested edits.

• La chica sabe tanto como el chico.
• The girl knows as much as the boy.

Here tanto is acting as direct object to the verb saber (What does she know? Tanto.) or, perhaps more accurately, it is acting as an adverb (How much does she know? Tanto.)

• A la chica le encantan los juguetes tanto como al chico.
• The girls loves toys as much as the boy.

This sentence is difficult on multiple levels, not least of which is the "backward" design of encantar. It literally means that toys are just as "enchanting" to the girl as they are to the boy. Even after I wrote my corrected version of the sentence in Spanish I still didn't like it.

Here is the SpanishDict reference article on comparisons. Here is the StudySpanish reference article on comparisons of equality. And here is an About.com forum answer regarding tan and tanto.