Elementary - Apply for college

¡Hola todos! This is a great day to practice the imperfect tense! ¿Cómo eras tú el último año de la escuela secundaria? Ay ay ay. When I was applying for college in 1989, I was skinny and optimistic. I wanted to be a musician. Cuando solicitaba entrar la universidad en 1989, era flaco y optimista. Quería hacerme músico.

Oh, by the way, we used the verb aplicar for "to apply for" in this lesson; all the Latin Americans in the office preferred aplicar, so we went with it! In Spain, they prefer solicitar, which is also the word I taught to my students when I was a classroom teacher.

I vote for "Admissions Exam" though as an American I never had to use either term.

I'm not sure about how this works. Two questions. First of all, I'm assuming J.P. is speaking in his own voice, of himself. So the speaker's male. Okay, now to the questsions. Here's the line again: Cuando solicitaba entrar la universidad en 1989, era flaco y optimista. Quería hacerme músico. 1. I understand that "solicitaba entrar la universidad" refers to an action that's past now but was sort of ongoing in the moment described When I was applying. But then, by comparison, why use (yo) era flaco y optimista? Here the questions is about "era." That's solid preterite, eisn't it? So it implies to me that you are identifying the states of thinness and optimism as having been static, possibly implicitly permeanent. My intuition would be to use "estar" to describe my weight, for example, as it's mutable, and certainly my optimism, the same. Explantion, please? 2. Back to that descriptive couplet: flaco y optimista. Possibly you are saying this, maybe with a sort fof wink, in the spirit of I was (and believed I might always be) a thin person, and also I was an optimist? In other words, not the adjectival thin and optimistic, but the nouns a think person and an optimistic person. And thus we have Uun flaco," and "un optimista," which I didn't know before but now suspect is a noun that has a feminine ending even if it's attached to a male. Un poeta, un existencialista," "un Fidelista." Am I right? Those were nouns you were saying, not adjectives? Thanks.

yardbird, "era" is the imperfect form of ser. The preterit form is "fui." So "era flaco y optimista" means "I was a skinny and optimistic." Both words are functioning as adjectives in my sentence. If you throw an article in front of an adjective, (i.e., "un flaco") the adjective does noun duty ("a skinny dude). Because adjectives can do noun duty, the line between stand-alone adjectives and nouns is not as cut and dry as in English. At that point, whether it´s a predicate adjective or a predicate nominative is pretty much a question of semantics, but I would come down on the side of predicate adjective. Hope that helps!

Cuando yo tenía 18 añitos, quería ser enfermera,jajaja, e intentaba entrar EN la facultad de enfermería.

Yo prentendia hacer en primer lugar facultad de Educacion fisica, o psicologia, o medicina alternativa, pero medicina alternativa no es considerado curso superior. Yo hice graduacion en educacion fisica, y hoy estoy terminando un pos grado en E.F.

una leccion lleno con mucha informacion!!estoy aprendiendo tantas cosas con cada.