Apenas vs acabar de
I once wrote a small passage in Spanish on Lang-8 for practice and one of the sentences in it was:
Eng.: I just finished watching a telenovela.
Apenas acabé de ver una telenovela.
But some native speaker corrected it to this:
Acabo de terminar de ver una telenovela.
I am confused because I thought apenas was used in precisely these contexts! I learned the word recently because another native speaker taught me about it while correcting a sentence in another practice passage. I had written:
Eng.: I just registered with this site today.
Hoy recién me registré en este sitio.
And it was corrected to this:
Apenas hoy me registré en este sitio.
To me both the contexts sound similar and yet I am advised to use apenas in one and acabo de in the other. Could someone please help me understand this? Sorry for the long rant but I had to best explain the situation!
1 Answer
"Acabo de + infinitivo" means "to have just finished doing something" or "to have just done something":
Acabo de comer... I have just finished eating... I just ate.
Acabo de llegar... I have just arrived... I just got here.
"Apenas" means "just" as in "hardly" or "barely":
Apenas habías crecido lo suficiente... You had just grown up enough... you hardly had grown up enough... you barely had grown up enough.
Apenas había llegado a casa cuando tuve que salir otra vez. I barely arrived...
Apenas conocía a mi vecino porque no lo veía nunca. I hardly got to know...
"Apenas" in your second example could mean something like:
I don't know much about this site; I just barely signed up (I have hardly been here).
