What if you know the individual words but don’t understand the sentence?
If you find yourself knowing the individual words, but not understanding the sentence, it’s probably one of three things (in no particular order):
- One or more of the individual words have other definitions you haven’t really learned yet;
Example: tener, hacer, empeno (with a tilde), etc.
- There’s a grammatical issue here you haven’t learned or gotten the hang of yet.
Example: the subjuctive; a pronoun placement issue like “hacerselas,” or relative prononuns like “lo que, las que,” etc.
- It’s a screwy phrase, idiom or lexical variation that you just have to know.
Examples: Does “dar a conocer” mean “to give to know, or to give to meet for the first time, or to give to be familiar with?” Actually it means, “to annonce.” “Hace calor?” is that to he/she/it makes heat, or she/she/it does heat? Actually, it means “it’s hot.” Silly or stupid for no reason? Yes. Will you eventually get used to it with more exposure? Yes to that too (and everything else.)
Por lo tanto, desde luego…?
those are excellent examples of #3. the individual words mean one thing, but put together they mean something totally different.
Por lo tanto “should” mean “there it so much,” but it doesn’t it actually means, “thus, hence, therefore accordingly.”
Same thing with desde luego. The words literally mean “since/from after” but instead put together them mean “of course! Naturally!, Certainly!, etc.”