Losing Something You Never Had

Some of the sample sentences in our lesson on perder provide a good example of how you can't always translate a particular word in the same way, that you have to adjust to the context. Perder is the verb for "to lose," and that translation almost always works well. But here's one where it does not: Perdí el bus de las 3.30. Translate that literally, and you end up with "I lost the 3:30 bus."

It doesn't take too much thought to come up with something much better: "I missed the 3:30 bus." As you study Spanish, one way you can get more use out of the words you already know is to look for expanded meanings that words such as perder can have.