Foreign Native

Object pronouns in Spanish are reasonably straightforward unless you’re dealing with third persons singular and plural, when some complications arise. The object pronouns – me, te, lo/la/le, nos, os (Spain), los/las/les – are applied much as the English – me, you, him/her, us, and them. Whether to use “lo” or “la” for “him” and “her” and [...]

Thanks to catalytic converters, unleaded fuel, ozone monitoring and restrictions on dirty industry, air pollution in Mexico City is much less than it was in the early 1990s. Noise pollution, however, has survived the endeavors of planners to improve environmental conditions in one of the world’s largest cities. The birds – of which there are a considerably large [...]

Downtown Mexico City is humming again – the museums and shops are all open, the restaurants are back in full swing, and the streets running off the Zocalo are teeming with the usual weekend crowds. Some people are still taking the precaution of wearing face masks, but the city center now appears much as it [...]

We dealt some while back with Mexico’s cavalier attitude toward the “official” use of conditional verb tenses, and how the conditional and imperfect subjunctive are applied interchangeably.  That entry omitted mention of  the verb “poder” - already quite  irregular. It so happens that the equivalent “to be able” is also a cause of many headaches for Spanish speakers [...]