Beginners 13: Habits and Customs

Spanish Obsessed beginners 13, habits and customs. Hola, ¿qué más?, ¿qué tal? [Hi, how are you?]

Yes, so it’s a Sunday, it’s a beautiful sunny day, and we’re doing this podcast before we head out into the sunshine and enjoy this beautiful day. As is often our habit when it’s a nice sunny day, which doesn’t happen to often here in London. But in this podcast we’re going to talk about habits and customs, and there’s several ways you can do this in Spanish. There’s lots of really interesting, useful vocabulary which you would typically use, so we’ll cover a lot of that, and then we’ll go over a few examples, and then we’ll also look at a really interesting verb, which is soler. And this is a verb which you often use with habits, so we’ll look at that as well. So when you’re talking about habits, you might want to ask “how often do you do something”? And this is something I actually often struggled with, because there’s not many translations for “often”, but we’ll go over those in a minute. How do you say “how often”?

Cada cuánto. So cuánto means “how much”, and cada means “every”. “Each”, or “every”. So literally translated it sounds very strange, we’re saying “every how much”… So instead of saying “how often”, it’s every “how much”. So for example, you might say “how often do you go to the gym”?

¿Cada cuánto vas al gimnasio? Or, “how often do you study English?”

Yeah, so a really useful little tip that, cada cuánto. You can also ask how many times a week, or how many times in a certain time period

Yeah, so how would you say “how many times a week”

¿Cuantas veces a la semana…? So again cuantas, this is how much, veces comes from vez, and in the plural it’s VECES, it changes its spelling, it means time. How many times a la semana, la semana is “week”, so ¿Cuantas veces a la semana…?, “how many times a week?” What about “how many times a year”?

¿Cuantas veces al año…? So we’re using this preposition a, ¿Cuantas veces a…? al, in this case, so a + l becomes al, al año. And that’s literally “to”, so “how many times to the year”, not “in”. So you don’t say ¿cuantas veces en la semana?

No, sounds strange

Cada día. So cada, which is what we met in our first question, cada cúanto, is “each”. Cada día, each day. Each week?

Cada semana. Each month?

And each year?

So that’s one way of saying “each”, cada. Or you could say “every day”, and you might say that by saying Lis: Todos los días

Todos los días. So todos means “all”. “All of the days”. Todos los días. “All of the weeks”:

Yeah, so this is “every week”, “all of the weeks”, todas las semanas.

Feminine, exactly

Días, yeah although it ends in a, it’s actually a masculine noun. El día, not la día, el día. There’s a few other ways to say how often you can do things, so let’s look at those as well. If I want to say “never”, how could I say that?

Nunca, and there’s another word, which is

Nunca jamás, so that’s “never”, never ever. If it’s a bit more than never, you might say “almost never”, how do you say that?

Casi nunca. So casi, “almost”. Casi nunca, or casi jamás

No? So casi nunca is better.

Ok, and if it’s more often than that, it might be Lis: De vez en cuando

De vez en cuando, which I think is best translated as “from time to time” , de vez en cuando. If it’s quite often, you might say

A menudo, “quite often”. Similar to that is

Or frecuentemente. Frecuentamente, or frecuentemente?

Frecuentemente.

Yeah, frequently.

Or if it’s very frequently, con mucha frecuencia. And more than that might be “always”, which is

So there we go, we’ve run the scale from “never” to “always”. So I’m going to ask Lis a few questions about her customs and her habits, and she’s going to reply using some of those words we’ve just covered. ¿Cada cuánto vas al gimnasio? [how often do you go to the gym?]

¿Casi siempre? Almost always?

Siempre. Of course, because you’re living in Inglaterra.

¿Cuantas veces al día tomas café? [How many times a day do you have coffee?] Lis: Una vez al día [One time a day]

Algunas veces. That’s one we didn’t cover before, actually, algunas veces means “sometimes”. Algunas veces. ¿Cuantas veces a la semana comes chocolate?

¿Cuatro veces a la semana comes chocolate? [Four times a week you eat chocolate?] Lis: Sí [Yes]

I didn’t know about this! You do it in secret.

You like it as a pudding. Un postre, “a pudding”. ¿Cada cuánto llamas a tu familia? [How often do you call your family?]

Con mucha frecuencia. Ok, now Lis is going to ask me a few questions.

Nunca. [Never]

¿Me gusta el cine? Claro. [Do I like the cinema? Of course.] Lis: ¿Cada cuánto vas al cine? [How often do you go to the cinema?]

¿Cada cuánto voy al cine? Una vez al mes, cada mes. Dependiendo de las películas. [How often do I go to the cinema? Once a month, every month. Depending on the movies] So there you go, some useful phrases for you there, we hope. Now, we’re going to look at one of the most useful verbs for talking about habits and customs, which is

Soler. A beautiful sounding verb as well, soler. It sounds like sol, “sun”. And it’s an interesting verb, it means that someone does something as a custom or a habit. Or it could indicate something that often happens, so it’s all about repetition. The conjugations are a little tricky because it’s a stem-changing verb, so that o will often change to ue. So, Lis is going to conjugate the verb, have a listen and repeat the following conjugations, in the present simple tense:

So the stem changing from the o to ue happens on all of the conjugations except for nosotros. Actually, vosotros, we didn’t do that one. In Spain they say vosotros

Soléis. Yeah, so vosotros and nosotros are the only two where the stem doesn’t change to ue. With everything else it becomes ue, so yo, not solo, yo suelo, tú sueles, usted suele, but nosotros solemos. So let’s take a look at a couple of examples. What’s our example Lis?

Suelo tomar dos cafés cada día. So we’ll work backwards. You remember that cada día is “every day”, dos cafés, “two coffees”, so “two coffees every day”, tomar is “to take”, , but you use tomar to mean “drink” in this sense. Tomar dos cafés cada día, “to drink two coffees every day”, and then this suelo, so in this case we’re saying “I usually”, suelo. “I usually drink two coffees every day”. What’s another example?

So again, suelo in this case means “I usually”, suelo ir al gimnasio tres veces a la semana. “I usually go to the gym three times a week”. ¿Qué sueles comer en casa? [What do you normally eat at home?]

So Lis, in Colombia no solía, and that’s in the past, no solía tomar mucho te, “I didn’t have much tea”, and then what else did you say?

But in England I usually, suelo tomar mucho te en Inglaterra. So how could you say in Spanish “I usually eat at home”?

Yeah, it’s a good alternative, you could say normalmente.

How could you say “I don’t usually work at home”?

So trabajar, just to remind you, is to work, en casa, at home. No suelo trabajar en casa, I don’t usually work at home. How could you say “it usually rains in England”?

Suele llover en Inglaterra. So llover is “to rain”, en Inglaterra, with a double-r, so you have to roll, Inglaterra, “it usually rains”, suele, “it usually rains”, suele llover. So some useful phrases for talking about habits and customs. Hasta luego.