HELP! Spanish

[Happymonkey]

Ok i am very confused. in the spanish language in the present tense hablamos means: we speak. In the Preterite (past tense) hablamos means we did speak. how can i recognise what each one means by just looking at them because they both look the same!??!! please help because i really need to know! thanx v. much :-)

[xyzzy@bok]

hardly a desperate cry for HELP! but i think you will find it's context driven like our word 'set' is. :-)

[gazzawazza]

Xyzzbok is right, it is recognised by the context. It actually means "We spoke..." as opposed to "We have spoken, which would be "hemos hablados."

You do need the rest of the sentence to understand exactly what is meant, for example "Hablamos con ellos frecuentamente" means "We speak to them often" whereas "Hablamos con ellos ayer" means "We spoke with (to) them yesterday".

Hope this makes it a little bit clearer, but you can tell the difference when you understand the context>

[gazzawazza]

Just to add a bit more, if you think about it in english, usually, when you say "we spoke," the sentence or statement isn't finished until you add the time when you spoke, ie "we spoke yesterday" or "we spoke last week." It's exactly the same in spanish, so you can tell the tense from the time. Hope this is clear enough.