Using hacía as referring to earlier part in conversation

Question

In English you can say something like "You wanted a phone right?" "Yeah I DID until..." Can you do the same in Spanish like "¿Querías un teléfono sí?" "Sí hacía hasta que..." Or another example "I thought they loved eachother" "no THEY DIDN'T" So my question is, is it possible to kind of shorten down sentences like how we do in English?

Welcome to SpanishDict. - rac1, Apr 13, 2017

Answer 1

We don't shorten sentences with auxiliary verbs like in English.

Do you like tomatoes? Yes, I do. Did Peter phone Mary? Yes, he did. Has Tom studied his lesson ? Yes, he has. etc

In English we can have short answers using auxiliaries like "do", "did", "has" as you could see above or many more like "can", "would", "should" etc.

In Spanish we DON'T use auxiliaries like this. To make it short we could just say SÍ or NO. Easy, right?

¿ Te gustan los tomates? Sí. ¿Peter llamó a Mary por teléfono? Sí. ¿Querías un teléfono? Sí.

Answer 2

In your first example--and your second example, you use the English auxiliary verb "Did." "Do," "does" and "did" "do" not exist in Spanish. Even my last sentence is said in Spanish without the auxiliary "did" "These words do not exist in Spanish." Estas palabras no existen en español.

So your "Sí hacía hasta que---" would be OK if you drop the "hacía"

For your last sentence. "No they didn't" would have to be expressed as "No, no es cierto."

We have an English Professor on the site who would probably call "do" and "did" MODAL verbs. ( I think--I'm no English scholar.)