So today I attacked the preterit tense of verbs. This is the tense which indicates "an action done and completed in the past." Like I voted, voté, as in I done voted and I won't vote no more. The conjugations are relatively straight forward, based largely on whether they are -ar, -er, or -ir verbs. If you don't get that, don't worry. I don't either. It means something to those more fluent than I. And then of course there are the exceptions. Some of the ar er and ir verbs change the stem (the basic verb) depending on what the noun is, the phase of the moon, or the mood your spouse usually is in when they wake up. And you can forget about the verbs to be, to know, or to haber, which doesn't quite translate into English on its own. They are some of the last remnants of the tortures Torquemada used on the ungodly.
But I didn't come here to talk about verbs. Actually, I'm not doing too badly on them. I came to talk about email and texting in Spanish.
Just like in English, Spanish texts (mensajes de texto) have their own abbreviations. Interestingly enough, many of them come from English. For example, for que pasa, (what's going on,) k pasa is used. Or sometimes just k p. TQM is te quiero mucho, I love you very much. And so forth. None of this is terribly important unless you are a 20-something texting a friend in Spanish. I suppose it makes as much sense as English texting, where all you have to do is remove the vowels. This despite the fact that if you are remotely competent at typing, it takes no longer to type ¿Que pasa?
Fortunately I don't get tested on texts.
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