You use both podrias and pudiste for “you could (sing. Informal)” Please explain the differenc
Hi, @Jliebe! Podrias is like a modal verb could in a present tense; (you could if you wanted bad enough) Pudiste is " you can" in a past tense (when you were young you could to it); Are you talking about memrise official Spanish courses?
This conversation could be useful in the official Spanish course ?
of course… if the phrase is from that course
That is from the A1 Spanish Memrise course. As you can see, there is no
context given, just the brief English phrase.
Hi @Jliebe,
Yes, it’s a tricky one. The ‘attribute’ is the only clue that you can use during tests to tell these two apart.
The entry for “podrías” is in Level 64. The heading of that level indicates that it is the ‘conditional’ form of ‘you could’ but, of course, you don’t see the heading during tests. The attribute for this one just reads “(sing. informal)”.
The entry for “pudiste” is in Level 78. The ‘attribute’ for this one (which you will see during tests) reads “v (past ‘could’)”. The clue is the word “past”.
This may also help: http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/poder.
Good luck!
Thanks. I’ll keep an eye on the section title. BTW both appeared in the same test-section title wouldnt help there.
Unfortunately, the word “could” in English is ambiguous if there’s no context.
So, I’d suggest changing the English definitions along these lines:
pudiste = you (tú) were able to (completed past action), you could
podrías = you (tú) would be able to, you could
podías = you (tú) used to be able to, you could
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Memrise does not support A1 & A2 courses anymore. There could be errors in it but they won’t be corrected. Now they support only the new official courses: Spanish 1-3 (A1), Spanish 4-6 (A2) and Spanish 7 (B1).
If you don’t want to abandon Spanish A1 you can easily ignore podrías and it will never come up again.
If you decide to take those new official courses and then have questions or find a mistake then you can ask/ report it here [Course Forum] Spanish 1 to 7 by Memrise
Angileptol (Spanish language specialist at memrise) was so kind and promised to explain things you find in A1 & A2 but she can’t make any changes there. She has been a great help for me.
So if I finish a1 I could go right to Spanish 4? I’m almost done with A 1.
@Jliebe That’s correct! But if you want you can still do 1-3 also besides the new Spanish4. They are new and improved, some expressions are different and there are new expressions also. It is really easy to ignore words you’ve already learnt
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@sircemloud: the original question does not pertain to a certain course forum. It is a language usage question, or a question set to the general public/user base, etc. Such threads should not be merged with specific course forums, please.
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What you have to think with the verb poder is that if you use the preterite form, you were not really saying “could.” Pudiste hacerlo means you were able to do it, not you could do it.
If you were able to do smth you could do that.
Being able to = can
Hi Attiker.
Can is a really interesting verb. In the present tense, “can” and “to be able to” are fairly synonymous:
A: I am able to fix the refrigerator.
B: I can fix the refrigerator.
Will the refrigerator be fixed? Both cases present a hopeful scenario.
Not so in the past tense. Look what happens:
A: Yesterday I was able to fix the refrigerator.
B: Yesterday I could fix the refrigerator.
Was the refrigerator fixed? Sentence A is a triumphant yes, it got fixed. However, sentence B sounds pretty bad for our pocketbook. It sounds like the refrigerator is still broken. Maybe it got fixed yesterday but today it’s broken again and the speaker isn’t able to repair it.
In Spanish, the preterite tense of “poder” is translated “was able to” rather than using the word could because when you say: Pude reparar la nevera it means that it’s fixed and “could” doesn’t get that message across.
This is probably more than you want to know.