![]() I did this because I wasn't getting enough results with amiga. ¿Quién es…?), so que wins.You might have noticed I searched for amigo instead of amiga. If you look closely, you'll realize that most of the quien results are actually for quién (…mi amigo. Furthermore, instead of relying on plain Google, we can use Google Books to find a more reliable source.Unfortunately, not all books in Google Books are reliable sources (the second book in this image is full of mistakes) so it's best to stick with famous authors like Elvira Lindo (by the way, she writes awesome children's novels that I wholeheartedly recommend for native Spanish reading practice).That's 10,500 results for "mi amigo que es" and only 252 for "mi amigo quien es". Since it's a specific combination of words, we can get more relevant results by googling them using "double quotes". Everything else seems to be right, but is it really "que es una verdadera fotógrafa" or "quien es una verdadera fotógrafa"?Let's see if we can find that exact usage somewhere. In fact, your Spanish Spider Sense should be tingling for two reasons:gusanillo is not an error (unless you assume that gusano = worm = bug = error)Carmen is a woman, so it should be una amiga and una verdadera fotógrafa. Never take anything you see here for granted. ![]() Explaining that difference deserves its own post, but for sentence structures like that we can probably rely on Google Translate:Google Translate is like that annoying kid in class who always thinks he knows the answer but gets it wrong half of the time. Googling a bit more shows that picar, entrar and venir are valid options:Me picó el gusanillo de la fotografía…Me entró el gusanillo de la fotografía…Me vino el gusanillo de la fotografía… The relative pronoun who can be confusing because sometimes it's translated as que and other times as quien. By looking at the pronouns and the prepositions, we can generalize it to "picarle a alguien el gusanillo de algo". We can use the excellent Collins English-to-Spanish dictionary.That last one seems to be what we were looking for. An idiomatic expression like the photography bug can probably be used for other things besides photography, so let's only look up "bug". ![]() I hope it motivates to take on last week's challenge in full force.We'll start by breaking down the sentence into easily digestible pieces, identifying the problematic areas, and working through them one by one.Let's assume that these six things are the ones that give you trouble:I got the photography bug a few months ago.My friend Carmen (who is a real photographer).It happened when she asked me to hold her camera for a second.She rummaged through her bag trying to find one of her telephoto lenses. ![]() It's the only way to become really fluent.This article is a guide for how you might go about translating a native sentence like the one above. She looks for something in her bag.One of the reasons you might be stuck in intermediate purgatory is that you're spending too much time working with classroom sentences instead of focusing all your energy on mastering native sentences.When you're a total beginner it makes sense to work with simplified sentences because they make it easier to grasp the core concepts of the language, but once you reach an intermediate level, you should be spending the lion's share of your time playing at the advanced level. Here is an excerpt:I got the photography bug a few months ago, when my friend Carmen (who is a real photographer) asked me to hold her camera for a second while she rummaged through her bag trying to find one of her telephoto lenses.Native sentences are typically longer than 20 words, they combine multiple ideas, and they're full of idiomatic expressions and other descriptive words.Classroom sentences on the other hand, are short, simple and unconnected:I like photography. This past Thursday I posted an English-to-Spanish translation challenge made up of native sentences. ![]()
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