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Spanish Verb Highlight: Oír

Peter — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:27:47 +0000

Welcome to the first post of a new series at Babelhut.com, Spanish Verb Highlight. This series will highlight a different Spanish verb in every post, and provide several example sentences showing how the verb is used in different tenses.

The first verb highlighted is oír, which means to hear, or to listen to. Oír is an irregular verb, and one that I personally have trouble remembering how to conjugate. You have probably seen or heard oír in the form of ¡oye!, which is used to get someone’s attention in the same way that we would say “hey!” in English.

Let’s look at some example sentences, some of which I have pulled from the Spanish-English Sentence Database:

He tenido que dormir con tapones para no oír tus ronquidos.
I’ve had to sleep with earplugs so I wouldn’t hear your snores.

Oigo las sirenas muy cerca.
I hear sirens very close by.

Se oyeron unos gritos de dolor.
They heard some painful screams.

¿Has oído lo que han dicho las noticias?
Have you heard what they’re saying on the news?

Creo que oiga algo.
I think I hear something.

¿Qué estás oyendo?
What are you listening to?

Te oyó la primera vez.
He heard you the first time.

Add these sentences to the SRS of your choice so that you don’t forget how to use this verb!

Photo credit: CarbonNYC

¡Muchas gracias, Time Warner Cable! How did you know I am studying Spanish?

Peter — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:51:21 +0000

Today I received yet another envelope from Time Warner Cable addressed to “Peter Carroll or Current Resident,” which was seconds from being thrown in the trash can when I decided to open it. This is what was inside:

Click to enlarge

I was surprised to receive the advertisement in Spanish. I don’t think the neighborhood I live in has a high concentration of Hispanic people, though I could be wrong about that. All my previous dealing with TWC has been in English. Still, it was nice to read it before I threw it away, and realize I understood most of it without any trouble. I did have to look up sorteo though, which looks odd to me the way it was conjugated, but I’m no expert.

Has anyone else ever received mail in an unexpected language? Talk about it in the comments!

Barra de Español 1.2 is now available!

Peter — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:51:25 +0000

The latest version of Barra de Español is now available from addons.mozilla.org! Those of you who already have an older version installed should see an update notification in Firefox soon, if you haven’t already.

What’s new in 1.2? The biggest new feature is the ability to find pronunciations of Spanish words. You can select a word on any web page, right-click on it, and choose “Pronunciar,” or you may type in the word into the toolbar’s search box and select “Pronunciar” from the dropdown to the right. The pronunciations are found on forvo.com.

Version 1.2 also adds support for Firefox 3.6, and drops support for Firefox versions below 2.0. Inserting the accented characters now works in rich text email editors such as Gmail and Yahoo mail. I’ve also added a new video link to fomny.com.

Check it out and feel free to leave feedback in the comments!

Barra de Español is now in the Public list on addons.mozilla.org

Peter — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:44:48 +0000

I received an email today from the Mozilla Add-ons group that Barra de Español has been approved to be in the public listing on addons.mozilla.org! This means that it no longer has the “experimental” label and can be installed without the user needing to check a box. For those of you who forgot what Barra de Español is, check out the original announcement. If you haven’t installed it yet, do so today!

Ramses launches the Spanish-English Sentence Database

Peter — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:28:24 +0000

Our good friend Ramses has just launched a wonderful database of Spanish-English sentences at http://sentences.spanish-only.com/. I insist that you go there now and bookmark it. I’ll wait.

This thing is great for the Spanish student! How many times do you learn a new word but you don’t have a sentence for it to put in your SRS? This happens to me all the time. Now you can go to the Spanish-English Sentence Database (SESDB? Am I allowed to make acronyms for something I didn’t create?) and search for the word and find a sentence containing that word. You may browse the database by the first letter in the sentence, if you like, too.

Ramses has a lot more detail about his creation at his blog, read it for more details.

The Winner of a Free Copy of ‘601 Spanish Verbs’

Peter — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:48:02 +0000

I’m sure the question on your mind right now is: So, who won the free copy of 601 Spanish Verbs? Was it me?

Well if you are mrcneff, then the answer is yes, you won! I will be contacting you for delivery information shortly.

For everybody else, I’m sorry. Maybe you will win next time. You could always purchase a copy for yourself.

¡Felicidades, mrcneff!

Review of 601 Spanish Verbs + a Giveaway

Peter — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:18:09 +0000

Update: The deadline for entering the drawing has been extended, see details at the bottom of this post.

A couple of months ago I received a copy of 601 Spanish Verbs for me to review. I incorporated this book into my Spanish studies to see how well it fared. Read on to find out what I think of it and how you can win a free copy for yourself!

The Verb Guide

The Verb Guide section at the beginning of this book is pure gold. I’ve had trouble with the more advanced tenses in Spanish until I read this section. The descriptions of each tense are the clearest and most easily understood of any Spanish book that I’ve come across. I know some of you have heard “Screw Grammar!” from my friend Ramses, and to some extent I agree, but I think you still need to know when and how to use your verb tenses. You don’t need to memorize the rules but you do need read about them, and more importantly study sentences in your SRS that demonstrate these rules. This book has enough example sentences for each of the verb tenses that you will learn how to use them well.

This book also does an excellent job of explaining many of the exceptions that you must deal with in Spanish, and identifies the patterns you will see with irregular verbs, as well as the cases where there is no pattern, like that fui/fuiste/fue/fuimos/fueron can be either ser or ir, which I did not know before. I can honestly say that my Spanish has improved a lot just because of this section of the book.

The 601 Verbs

The bulk of this book is the reference section for the 601 verbs. This section is neatly laid out, with one verb per page. The verb’s infinitive form and meaning in English are at the top of the page with all the possible conjugations laid out in charts neatly over the rest of the page. The charts are very easy to read, with the suffix changes for each conjugation in bold. Some verbs in this section are highlighted as “must know verbs.” These pages have a light blue background instead of white, so that there are easy to see as you flip through the book. As a reference section it’s very well done, there’s only thing I think it lacks. In other verb books I’ve seen there are a few example sentences for each verb demonstrating the use of that verb in a several different tenses. Unfortunately this book does not have that.

Other sections

The book has a few more smaller sections in the back. The first is an activity section which is basically just a little test of how well you can use verbs in a sentence. Some of the questions are multiple choice and some are fill-in-the-blank. I haven’t tried quizzing myself with it just yet, but I intend to because this is another good source of sentences that show how the verbs are used.

The next section is a list of 75 “must know verbs,” which are the same 75 verbs highlighted in the main reference section. Following that are a list of tech verbs. The list is pretty short, and if you’ve already setup your computer for Spanish, you’ve probably seen most of these already. Following this is a section on text message abbreviations in Spanish. This is an interesting section, and maybe useful to those of you who text message with Spanish speakers. I can’t verify its utility though, as the only Spanish speaker that I send text messages to doesn’t know any of these abbreviations, although to be fair, we are in Texas and not in a Spanish-speaking country.

The next little section is a test preparation guide which are useful tips for students in academic settings, and they’re applicable for tests in subjects other than Spanish as well. Following this is the answer key to the earlier activity section. After that is the last section, which lists over 2500 more verbs. This section is actually great because if you could not find your verb in the main reference section, you can find it here with a short English definition and a page number which refers to a verb in the main reference section that conjugates in the exact same way. They really could have named this book 3101+ Verbs because that’s really what you get with this section.

The CD-ROM

Like many educational books, this book included a CD-ROM. Don’t waste your time with it. It contains an e-book for the iPod of useful phrases in Spanish. It only works with the iPod, and not any other music device. I don’t own an iPod so I borrowed one from a friend to review the CD-ROM. The installer program on the CD is very clunky and requires you to changes all sorts settings in iTunes that you may not want to change. Once installed on your iPod, the e-book is located under “Extras -> Notes.” The whole experience feels very kludgy and you’re really better off with a real travel guide if that’s what you’re after. There are actual mp3 files on the CD if you want to listen to Spanish pronunciation of the phrases in the e-book.

The Verdict

Because I find that numeric ratings are pretty useless, I like to give a score of either buy, borrow, or avoid. I rate this book as buy for any student of the Spanish language.

The Pros:

Description of verb tenses are clearest and easiest to understand of any Spanish book I’ve read
Covers typical verb stem-change patterns well
Good example sentences demonstrating the various tenses
The reference section is laid-out well
Low price: the cover price is only $15.99
You really get over 3101 verbs

The Cons:

In the verb reference section there are no sentences for each of the verbs
The CD-ROM is not very useful

Giveaway: Win a free copy of 601 Spanish Verbs

I have an extra copy of 601 Spanish Verbs that I will give to a randomly selected entrant. There are two ways to enter the drawing. The first way to enter is to leave a comment on this post. The second way is to send a tweet via Twitter that contains both the text “#babelhut.com” and a link to this article (it’s okay to use a url-shortener like tinyurl.com or bit.ly). The drawing is open to everyone. You may enter exactly twice, once in the comments on this post, and once on twitter.

The winner will be selected on Monday, ~~June 22~~ June 29 and notified either by email or by a direct message on Twitter. Good luck!

Update: The deadline has been pushed by a week to give people more time to enter the drawing.

Update: Barra de Español version 1.1 has been released

Peter — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:38:54 +0000

I’ve just released an update to Barra de Español, version 1.1. The new version has some new features that I believe make it a necessary upgrade for those of you currently using version 1.0. You can get the new version from https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/12029.

Here is what’s new in this version:

Wrapped “loose” variables and function in a javascript object to meet addons.mozilla.org’s standards.
Added http://www.cinetube.es/ to video sites
Fixed unicode text in search history being stored incorrectly. This change may cause you to lose your previous search history.
Replaced CNN en Español with CNN Chile, since the Chile site actually contains news.
Words selected in text areas can now be defined with the right-click menu.
Added a menu to insert the punctuation characters: upside-down question mark and upside-down exclamation mark.

For those of you who aren’t yet using Barra de Español, it’s a Firefox toolbar for students of the Spanish language. Find out more from the original release announcement.

False friends: decepcionar

Peter — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:24:28 +0000

Every once in a while, we all run into a word that deceives us about its meaning. Often it is because the word looks similar to a word in your native language, which happened to me today on twitter. I had just discovered an excellent blog called ReVerbSpanish and I had tweeted about it. The author of that blog, Eleena, sent me this tweet:

@peterjcarroll ¡Muchas gracias por tu voto de confianza! Espero que no te decepcione.

Decepcione? I read that and thought to myself, “Why would she hope to not deceive me?” It was clearly dictionary time. It turns out that the verb decepcionar means to disappoint. I felt silly, but I’ve learned a new word and I won’t make that same mistake again!

Are there any false friends in your language of study that have deceived you before? Tell us in the comments!

Barra de Español: A new Firefox toolbar for Spanish students

Peter — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:39:38 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, Spanish students across the globe, I’d like to introduce you to my latest creation! It’s a Firefox add-on called Barra de Español. It lets find word translations and definitions using wordreference.com by typing the word in the toolbar, or by highlighting the word and right-clicking on it. It helps insert the special characters that Spanish uses that may not be on your keyboard. It provides links to native Spanish web sites which can help you in your study of the language, including news, reference, and video sites. But the best part is that it’s free!

Phew! I’m done with the sales pitch now. Seriously though, check it out. You can download it from addons.mozilla.org. It’s currently considered “experimental” on their site so you have to check a little box that says that yes, you really want to install this. Don’t worry though, I’ve tested it thoroughly and I use it myself daily. It is definitely release-quality, and hopefully the reviewers at Mozilla will upgrade the add-on from its experimental status shortly.

Why would I create such a thing? Well, why wouldn’t I? I’m studying Spanish and I know how to program a computer. The natural conclusion is that I would write this, right? The truth is, I didn’t think of it until I saw this article on Tofugu.com talking about a Japanese toolbar. I began to wonder why all the cool Japanese studying kids got the cool tools, but I had nothing like that to help me with my Spanish studies. I think this shows that jealousy is not always a bad thing.

If you interested in more details about the creation of Barra de Español, I wrote about the process on my personal blog. Also, I want to thank Ramses from spanish-only.com for checking my Spanish on the project site.

So what are you waiting for? Try it out, and then leave a comment to let me know what you think about it!