From the mailbox (links and English translation of the sample sentence added):

In yesterday's comma lesson, you gave this example: Durante los primeros 14 años de su vida, fue conocida como María. (During the first 14 years of her life, she was known as Maria.) I believe that I read somewhere that in Spanish (unlike English), cardinal numbers precede ordinal numbers. By that rule, your example should have read: "Durante los catorce primeros años, ..." Sorry that I cannot remember where I read this rule — but it stuck with me due to its strangeness. Please confirm or refute, as I have no materials at hand to do so at this time. Thanks.

I'm not sure what the "rule" is, and I haven't found it mentioned in my reference materials, but in real use both word orders seem to be quite common, although the order you give is more so.

Read more...

From the mailbox:

I subscribe to your daily emails as I am a fan of Spanish dichos. I have been looking for a dicho that says something like "waste is wrong." Do you have any suggestions?

Here's what you may be looking for: Quien no malgasta, no pasa necesidades.

Literally, that's "The one who does not waste does not suffer hardship." A quite close English equivalent is "Waste not, want not."

Incidentally, in this proverb, necesidades is a type of false friend, or pasa necesidades can be thought of as an idiom. Read more...

Commas may be the most challenging of all types of punctuation, and that's true in both English and Spanish. Fortunately, as our new lesson on commas explains, the use of the punctuation mark is similar in the two languages. It's easy to think of the comma as merely something used to indicate vocal pauses, but it's much more than that — it's used to clarify and help turn what might be a jumbled mess of words into something understandable.

David Beckham was quoted last month as saying, "Ésta es la primera vez que deseo que pierda el Manchester." At first glance, it may look like the soccer superstar is mangling his acquired language, since a literal translation would come out something like "This is the first time that I want Manchester to lose," when what he wanted to say was "This is the first time that I have wanted Manchester to lose."

But Beckham had it right — in Spanish it is common to use the present tense of verbs when English uses a perfect tense. What may seem even more strange is a sentence as "Hace un año que estudio español" — a year ago I am studying Spanish.

This use of the present tense is explained more fully in our most recent lesson, on using the present tense to refer to an action that began in the past.