Confused about using question words without questions?

Question

Hola everyone! I am wondering how you would translate a sentence such as "What I don't understand is how you always had time for yourself, but you were always too busy to play with me."

My guess is you can't just tack on the que or the como to the rest of the sentence, but I'm not sure how it is supposed to be done.

My rough draft of a translation is: "Que no comprendo es como tu siempre tenías tiempo para ti mismo, pero siempre estabas desmasiado ocupado para jugar conmigo."

Any and all corrections are welcomed, because I'm not too familiar with the past tenses either. Thanks guys!

:) - ian-hill, Mar 1, 2015

Answer 1

You begin your translation with "Que no comprendo.." Literally, you are saying "That I do not understand..." To say "What I don't understand..." place a "lo" at the beginning. Thus you would say "Lo que no comprendo..."

Answer 2

There are various ways to say it and using Jubilado´s idea you could say: Lo que no comprendo es el hecho de que tú siempre tenías tiempo para ti mismo mientras siempre estabas desmasiado ocupado para jugar conmigo.

Or in a statement/question form: No comprendo ¿cómo es que tú siempre tenías tiempo para ti mismo mientras siempre estabas desmasiado ocupado para jugar conmigo?

If you want to use pero before the last clause, it should be in a negative sense, ie: .... pero nunca te alcanzaba tiempo para jugar conmigo.

Thanks for this informative post. I especially appreciate the last part about using "pero" with a negative sense. - Jubilado, Mar 2, 2015

Answer 3

1. (in relative clauses)

a. lo que

He smoked what he had left in the pipe.Se fumó lo que le quedaba en la pipa.

I copied and pasted the above from the SpanDict translation for "What" in order to supplement my previous answer

Thanks so much malbecblend! Is the rest of my sentence correct? - Nhoff7349, Mar 1, 2015

Answer 4

We English speakers always have to be careful about translating to Spanish because these two languages are not closely related. "What" can be ¿qué?, que, ¿cuál? and even ¿Cómo? as in not hearing what someone said. In English we use "what" to mean "that" or "that which". In you example you can substitute "that which" in your English and see that it fits so "lo que" is correct because it means "that which" in the general sense. So malbecblend is correct.

My preference for translating the part about ...how you always... is ...la hecha que siempre tenías.... I would not us "como". I don't know if you can use "como", so I personally would not use it. Perhaps a native speaker will add some clarification on that. I do think your use of the imperfect tenías is correct.