Past Participle take number & gender of the subject!

This should be basic, but doesn’t seem to be addressed in ANY tutorial I’ve seen. One of the very first things I learned was that adjectives & articles follow number & gender.

I’ve been going crazy trying to find a sensible meaning to words like “agredidas”, " surgidos", and others. Neither the asociación de academias de la lengua española" nor “Real Academia Española” had an answer. (Su búsqueda no produjo resultados.) I’ve asked tutors (no answers), tutorial videos (no answers)…

I’ve been assuming it was slang, or just mistakes (I know there’s many English mistakes in English media!).

Even conjugation charts seem to ignore it: (“han surgido” rather than “han surgidos/surgidas”)

Or…

Maybe I still have no clue.

Past participle never takes number nor gender when it’s conjugated with “haber”.
It takes number and gender when it’s an adjective or with “ser” or "estar.

Good to know.

They also (I think) takes number/gender where they stand alone.
Possibly in contexts where “ser/estar” is implied, though not explicit.
That is, they’re effectively used as a noun.

I’ve been studying a LOT (slow learner, apparently) for 6 years or so, and only just recently came across any reference to it. MANY tutorials explain “drop the er/ar/ir” and replace with “ado/ido”. None (that I recall) speak of number/gender.

I’m happy I’ve finally found out. (I know LingQ, and many advocates, promote the idea that formal grammar education isn’t necessary, but rather “learn by immersion”, but it seems my brain needs it.)

To clarify, the reason a past participle in Spanish never matches the subject in number or gender when used with all conjugations of “haber” is because it is part of the verb, e.g., he visto, ella ha visto, los muchachos han visto. Haber + past participle = a compound verb.

By contrast, when the past participle is used as an adjective or noun, it does change in number and gender – e.g., las películas ya fueron vistas por los estudiantes,
ella ya estaba vestida, el libro ya fue devuelto a la biblioteca. Los registrados pueden comenzar de inmediato.

Grammar rules are enormously helpful to clarify meaning especially when the patterns are very different from one’s own language or from others which one already knows well. Knowing the rule is a shortcut; you don’t have to have hundreds of examples to know what is correct and what meaning it conveys.

FWIW, I routinely see incorrect translations in Spanish and Russian on LingQ most often because whoever made them did not understand the grammatical construction. The problem is worse in Russian because of the cases.

Thanks!

That helps clarify a lot.
I just hope the unlearning & relearning isn’t too much.

One of the vague translations I see regularly is “walked” (or the like) which in English is almost always the same past tense vs. past participle (he walked, he had walked) but in Spanish is (almost?) never the same. (caminó vs caminado)

A quick note on grammar learning, so you don’t think there is something unusual about your brain. It is true that “formal grammar education isn’t necessary” insofar as formal language instruction isn’t necessary.

However, none of this is to suggest that studying grammar rules, reviewing conjugations, etc. should never be done. Rather, the “LingQ approach” is best described by Master Steve himself: “treating the grammar lightly.” For most of the learning, your brain will notice the patterns/rules/how the language is behaving. But there are going to be times when you want to check that conjugation or review that grammar rule or whatever. That will explain what you are noticing. Then, now that you know the rule, you’ll go back to your reading and listening and you’ll get more out of it. Same thing with actively/deliberately studying the vocabulary.

My own way of doing Spanish during my serious commitment/90 Day Challenges was to spend 1.5 hours a day on my learning. About a third of my time (1/2 hour) was doing the “bottom up activities” (as Steve put it) of vocab, grammar, etc. and then two-thirds of the time (the hour) doing the “top-down activities” of reading and listening.

I’m okay with “something unusual about [my] brain”. Serves me well for the most part…problem solving.

6 to 8 hours a day for 6 years, now. 1 hour with flash cards (single word), 1 hour with Pimsleur, the rest with radio/tv/youtube listening exercises.
Real world audio is still (for the most part) “just noise”. (I can usually catch numbers in weather reports, little else. Highway #'s in traffic reports. “Call me”, or “call now” in advertisements.)
Tutorial audio (like those in LingQ) I can mostly follow. VERY boring, but I force it.
I’m pretty happy with my reading/writing.

It’s frustrating at times, but I’m determined. :slight_smile:

Some methods are more efficient than others. Playing the target language in the background where you don’t understand most of what is flying by is not an efficient way of learning. This is not merely my own experience, but is the conclusion of many experienced language teachers (including ones that appear in LingQ’s Spanish lessons (e.g., Karo Martínez). Instead, it is more efficient is to listen to things that you mostly DO understand. For many – including me – “mostly” is 80-90%. Since your profile says that you know about 6,000 words, in my experience that is not enough to be able to follow speech in a film or on the radio. You don’t know enough words and expressions and probably not enough grammatical patterns — that is, constructions that you understand and can use independently – even if you know the meaning of each word. (You do better in reading because there are lots of Latin cognates so you can guess their meaning when you see them but you can’t do this when you hear them. This is a common issue.) In my opinion your expectation that you “should” be able to understand authentic speech in authentic contexts at your level is unrealistic.
There are several more efficient ways to improve your “listening.”
Practicing single words with flashcards or reverse flashcards has never been a very efficient way for me to learn vocabulary because the words almost never appear by themselves in authentic speech. Rather, the words occur in phrases and being able to understand the meaning of the word in context is what is important. One advantage of learning short phrases (not single words) is that you can also learn and practice a grammatical construction: I want you to leave (quiero que te vayas) I want you to help me (quiero que me ayudes). Construct more examples using the same grammatical pattern (I want + que + subjunctive of the verb in the form of another person or persons doing the desired action.)
I have also found that using the dictation function of review exercises on LingQ to be very helpful in improving my own listening. It gives me practice listening to how the word is pronounced in a phrase when I make a lingQ of a phrase and not a single word. (Keep in mind that visually recognizing letter combinations on a page and understanding sound combinations uttered in authentic speech are NOT the same skill.)
Another really really helpful technique is to repeat out loud what I hear-without reading- in a lesson one sentence at a time. (On LingQ you can change the setting so you see and hear only one sentence at a time.) Since I cannot repeat what I don’t understand, I must pay closer attention to what I am hearing, at first breaking it up into meaningful, comprehensible phrases. This is not easy at first so I recommend doing it for only a few sentences at a time. However, doing this even 10 minutes a day is more effective in my opinion than listening to hours of background, unintelligible speaking.
Finally, I don’t understand what you mean regarding the translation of the verb caminar. Caminó = he/she/you walked. Ha caminado (compound verb) = he/she, you have walked. Había caminado (another compound verb) = he/she/you had walked.
Estaba caminando (another compound verb) = he/she/you was walking. There are lots more conjugations, all with separate English translations. If these differences were not reflected in the LingQ translation window, then the translation was INcorrect. Note that there are LOTS of mistakes in LingQ translations precisely because many do not understand the grammatical construction.

Thanks for the in depth response. ¡Muchas gracias!

I do try to find listening content “at my level” but the little I can find is incredibly boring. I suffer through what I can. Children’s shows have appropriate vocabulary, but almost always use unnatural voices (and a lot of noise). That said, I’ve been doing it anyway because I’d been told “it was the best way to learn”. But, no, I don’t listen to “hours of unintelligible speaking”. That’s just one part of my study (typically while driving to/from work). Most of my audio listening is YouTube tutorials (Español con Maria, Español con Juan, FluentU, WhyNotSpanish, Español Automático, SpanishPod101, etc.)

I always read aloud. I repeat when I can. With audio, generally, if I don’t get it the first time, I never do until reading it.

While single word flashcards aren’t efficient, they’re pretty much the only thing that actually works! Slow is better than not at all. Learning a phrase is more or less useless if I don’t understand the words.

Regarding LingQ’s “lots of mistakes” or “differences were not reflected” (my point regarding caminar): Yes. Unfortunately, not something I discovered immediately. Now, I take the time to look up nearly every word independently. Definitely a weakness, imo, of LingQ.

That said, I’m subscribed here (and nowhere else) because of the ability to download stuff I’m actually interested in. A FANTASTIC feature. However, I don’t think my vocabulary is expanding (much), but what I do know is being reinforced. I use other (free) services to work on expanding vocabulary (SpanishDict is my favorite).

I listen to lot’s of advice. I try to follow it, for a while anyway, until I’m confident “it ain’t working for me”.