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I am about to embark on a serious, long overdue mission to learn Spanish.

Assuming I put good effort into finding an answer first, can I ask beginner level (grammar, syntax, etc.) questions here (not resource requests, of course)? Or is this site more like the English Language & Usage site relative to the English Language Learners site? To be clear: I do not wish to use the site as my personal free Spanish tutor, but I have a feeling some reasonable (hopefully) but novice questions may come up.

The reason I am asking is that I did read the help center, but I found:

Questions on the following topics are welcome here:

[...]

  • Problems encountered by people learning Spanish

And it is not clear to me from that wording if questions by people learning Spanish are welcome here, or if this is more along the lines of, say, questions that Spanish language teachers may have about problems their students are facing.

Also, I'd make a best effort to ask them in Spanish, but initially I may have to use English.

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  • 1
    Best of success in your mission! You can ask in both Spanish and English, so feel free to use the one you prefer.
    – fedorqui Mod
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 6:25
  • 1
    Thank you for asking so politely! Indeed, you can flood us with questions about Spanish at any level, this site needs that! :-)
    – Charlie
    Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 7:47

2 Answers 2

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Absolutely, we're both ELL and ELU in one (I think the ELL split off once those questions ended up being too numerous on ELU).

The main thing is to check to see if there's another question that answers it, but if there's a specific context where it seems to not fully, I'd cite the previous mostly-similar one and then explain the continued difficulty.

On a side note, questions for Spanish language teachers are certainly on topic, but probably more on topic on LanguageLearners.SE (and generally not on topic on Academia.SE)

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Our only real prohibition against beginner-level questions is that questions must demonstrate a minimal level of research. As a general rule, if the question could be easily answered with a beginner-level resource (i.e. dictionary or text book), it's probably not a good fit here (or really, anywhere on the SE network)

"What does ir mean?" is not a good question. Just look it up in a Spanish dictionary.

"What is the difference between voy a ir and iré?" is a good question because it's not easily answered by a simple resource such as a dictionary.

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  • I especially like "if the question could be easily answered with a beginner-level resource (i.e. dictionary or text book), it's probably not a good fit here (or really, anywhere on the SE network)."
    – aparente001
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 5:04

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