Incorrect English/Spanish
I know the posting guidelines are clear, and the community does a really good job here letting people know when they made a mistake in something they've written. I've read a lot of English in the Q&A section that either isn't well worded, has a minor error, or is even just wrong.
I feel a little nervous reading Spanish that's been posted, though, because I don't know whether it's good quality or not. I can pick and choose based on threads that have native speakers involved and responding, but sometimes a search turns up something that doesn't have a lot of activity.
Is there anything that can be done to make this better? Maybe a button like the flag button that allows you to indicate that you'd like a native speaker to review the text (and then a queue where you could earn points for evaluating)? If you paired that with a count of how many native speakers marked text as 'incorrect/choppy/perfect' it would be pretty easy to know that certain content is well written.
Thoughts? Is the current commenting system sufficient?
5 Answers
I will tell you straight out. Do not trust my Spanish. My grammar is lousy. Having said that I have been living in Mexico for almost five years speaking only Spanish (99% of the time). I am understood and understand what is being said to me. Most people here don't think about grammar rules. They talk the way they were raised and learned with more influence from friends and family than from formal education. Its the same in the US and probably everywhere. Learn the rules but don't get so wrapped up in proper Spanish that you can't communicate because you will hear lots and lots of good but not perfect Spanish spoken in the streets.
I have never had anyone tell me that I should have used the subjunctive instead of the indicative or the preterite instead of the imperfect during a conversation. When I ask a native speaker questions about grammar they usually look at me like I'm nuts and say that they don't know why they say it that way they just do. Unless you want to get a degree in Spanish or become an interpreter relax and stop worrying about grammar and perfection. Almost everyone will be shocked that you are trying to speak their language.
I know that my grammar is lousy. I have trouble with tenses of verbs, gender of nouns, etc. Yet I have no trouble communicating with anyone in Spanish and every week I get compliments from native speakers on how good my Spanish is.
We all make mistakes… at my level, though, I won't catch them in Spanish and it'd be nice to have some way of knowing something is worth attempting to read. - wbyoung
Hola, Wby - I shouldn't worry too much, if it's a native speaker the big mistakes are pretty few and far between here and the use of colloquial language which might not obey all the grammatical rules but is in common use is, I feel, just as important to learn as the 'proper' grammar. After all this is what you'll be hearing in your day to day conversations if you go to a Spanish speaking country.
For instance - you'll read in practically all Spanish grammar books, English and Spanish ones, that you never follow si by the present subjunctive. That's the rule. But listen to native speakers around the world and you'll often hear such expressions as:
No sé si vaya a la fiesta. I don't know if he's going to the party.
(vaya is the present subjunctive form of ir: to go)
This sentence breaks all the rules but it's in common use and allows the speaker to share their leaning towards the 'he's not going to go' option. So should we say it's wrong and shouldn't be heard/read etc? How could we? Much better we learn to recognize it understand the nuance and more than likely we'll appreciate it's place in the language and perhaps even use it ourselves.
Another benefit of reading any errors by native speakers here is that you learn to recognize them and they won't throw you when you read or hear them somewhere else. For example a native speaker the other day translated something with: No creo que halla ido a la tienda. (or some similar construction). So I started thinking, wow, I've never come across this before, hallar (to find) being used as 'has/have' and I started to do a little investigation. It didn't take long to realize that he should have written 'haya' and was just writing it as it sounds. Now I've noticed it seems to be a common mistake but since I've taken the time to check it out it's not going to catch me again.
Anyway as they say in Spanish, solo es mi manera de pensar (that's just my opinion). All the best with your language learning, I'm sure you'll do just fine (smiley) - sorry we seem to have lost the ability to smile around here (sad face).
Good observation. My opinion is that some people have Spanish as their first language, like me, and people here have learned Spanish in the United States because they were born in Spanish-speaking parents. There are many methods to translate online but all fail if the syntax in Spanish is defective. The syntax or order of the words in Spanish is very important and is completely different from English. In many cases it is completely opposite to English.
I think you'll find a lot of quality answers on this site, from native speakers as well as those studying the language. You'll notice that when someone hits an answer spot-on, that he/she begins to accumulate votes. We don't vote for someone because we like him, but because he had a great answer, added to another's good answer, or had a particular insight no one else thought of. It site really regulates itself in that manner.
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When someone is a little off, usually someone else will correct them, or nobody will vote for his or her answer. This usually doesn't cause any hard feelings.
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Even the native speakers go back and forth in how to say things sometimes.
A brave but fair question. We do our best, that's all I can say and many of us are not even native English speakers. Besides, the world is not perfect, and you may find, visiting any country, that people out there speak, well, sloppily, at best. Unless you're only going to talk to highflying academics..
