Groups - Your slip is showing...
Ok, so this isn't all that deep, but the current Newbie lesson, "Nurse", with the line "Voy por uno nuevo" reminded me of a mini-epiphany I had recently concerning the structure: Voy por ____.
I had been trying (at least in my head) to find the right verb to say "get" as in: I'm going to get some water/my book/ the newspaper, etc. All the options seemed wrong so I usually avoided the phrase saying instead something like: Me falta agua, ya regreso.
Recently I asked a friend how to say this and she answered: We usually say "voy por agua."
Simple, right? And the difference, in a nutshell (¿en pocas palabras?), between speaking Spanish and being a human equivalent of a Google translator!
in the Group the deep end .
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Anna8
I thought the word obtener was the answer. But I asked my girlfriend and she said no. She said exactly what you said: “voy por agua” “voy por el periódico” etc.
Wow, anna8, I've never put "voy por..." and "I'll go get..." together like that cognitively; and I've been saying it for years! :)
There are dozens of ways we in English use the verb "to get" (i.e., "to get a new one" is different from "to get a job," which is different from "to get drunk," which is different from "to get served," ... etc.)
In fact, the verb "to get" was one of the litinus tests for dictionaries that I used to tell my students. If a Spanish-English dictionary doesn't have at least a page on different options for "to get," you should drop it like a hot rock!