Spanish · Chapter 12 · Lesson 10 · Grammar primer
Politeness formulas
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Spanish softens the verb, not with please
English leans on 'please'; Spanish leans on the verb. Dame agua por favor is still fairly blunt, because the command underneath has not moved. Bend the verb into the conditional first, or climb a rung to quisiera, and por favor becomes the finishing touch rather than the whole politeness budget.
¿Me podrías dar la sal?
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 6 min readPractice
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14-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 10 of 11 in this chapter