Prolific Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin America's best-known novelists and political commentators, died Tuesday.

Fuentes, who was born 83 years ago in Panama, was known best in the United States for his 1985 novel Gringo viejo, which became an American best-seller in the English translation, The Old Gringo, and the basis of a 1989 movie, Old Gringo, starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck.

His other well-known novels include his first, La región más transparente (titled in English as Where the Air Is Clear); Las Buenas Conciencias (With a Clear Conscience); Aura; La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz); and Terra Nostra. He received numerous awards, including the Cervantes prize.

Fuentes' essays about politics and culture appeared regularly in newspapers in Mexico and Spain, the most recent one published on the morning of his death. Read More...

Relative pronouns are a type of word that is easier to recognize in a sentence than to define. So here's an example: In the sentence "Did you see the car that I bought?" the relative pronoun is "that." And in the Spanish equivalent, "¿Viste el coche que compré?" the relative pronoun is que. Que is by far the most commonly used relative pronoun in Spanish, often serving as the equivalent of "that," "which" or "who."

If you were try translating a sentence such as "Quiero compartir algo que realizamos" as "I want to share something that we realized," you would be falling into the trap of relying on a false friend, a word the looks like it should be the equivalent of a similar English word but isn't.

As it turns out, the verb realizar can be translated in dozens of ways — but as explained in our lesson on realizar, "to realize" isn't one of them. In this particular case, because realizar often means "to get something done," a good translation (depending on the context, of course), might be "accomplish": "I want to share with you something we accomplished."

One of the things that helps keep learning a foreign language interesting is seeing how changing words can have surprising effects. For example, as explained in our newest lesson, on verbs that change meaning in the reflexive form, making a verb reflexive usually doesn't change its meaning a lot. For example, dormir usually means to sleep, but dormirse usually means to fall asleep.

But, as is almost always the case when citing grammar rules, there are exceptions. One of them mentioned in the lesson: Acordar usually means to agree (it's related to the English "accord,") but acordarse often means to remember.