Looseness of Spanish Grammar?
 

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to use this thread as justification to learn Spanish poorly or incompletely!:eek:

After having spoken with a few native Spanish Speakers (Latin American), I am getting the impression that in Spanish (much like in English or other languages), grammatical rules can sometimes be relaxed; there are countless examples of this in English ("good" is oftentimes used where the adverb "well" should be, people sometimes say "of" instead of "have," etc.)

My question is: How often are grammatical rules relaxed in most colloquial Spanish? For example, one individual with whom I spoke didn't really seem to differentiate between the indicative and subjunctive tenses - "comemos" and "comamos" would both work to get one's point across and the individual would not be greatly faulted for using such (i.e. it would not be considered juvenile/"infant" grammar).

Muchas gracias!:D

You can relax the language as much as your partner does.
If the other person agree, you an relax it as much as you want. :D :D
I must say latin American usually have another usages, wich are not worse or better, but simply more used.
Saludos :D

When it comes to verb tenses you have to follow the rules, I'm afraid.
Something that is more relaxed in Spanish than in English is word order,almost anything is possible.

Well, to some extent.
A coleague of mine is an American, living in Madrid for 20 years and she doesn´t get a single subjunctive tense right, and I think it doesn´t matter, we understand her anyway. On the other hand, some Spanish people use some verbs incorrectly but that sounds bad to us, if you are a foreigner, everything is OK, but if you are Spanish things change, you sound low-class.

I'd like to add that in some places in Spain, they don't use the correct tense of the verbs perhaps because there is another language spoken.

For instance, in Galicia, they say "viniera" instead of "vino" (Juan viniera el lunes, for Juan vino el lunes), or "estuve" for "he estado" (estuve ahora en tu casa, instead of he estado ahora en tu casa), I guess it's because they don't use compound verbs in Galician (I'm not really sure). And in Euskadi, for example, I've found people who don't say the articles (voy a garaje a buscar coche, for voy al garaje a buscar el coche)

In Latin America (the Carribbean in particular) people use articles less than they do in Spain--not officially as in written documents, but in every-day speech.

In Spanish there're verbs more relaxed rules than English.

For instance.

Jugamos, jugaremos, jugar.

There're more choices in Spanish as often as you use them.

Now in other languages only there're a littles choices.

Play, To will play, To won't play relatively theses choices are the same only with the different between them are the future.

I hope this can help you.

Some things can be relaxed, for example:

Sometimes you can omit the "de" in "de que":
Estoy seguro que vas a ganar.
Estoy seguro de que vas a ganar.

Sometimes you can omit the "que" that introduces a dependent clause:
Espero te haya gustado lo que hice.
Espero que te haya gustado lo que hice.

You specifically mention not differentiating between the indicative and subjunctive in some cases. In Spanish, this is never going to happen with a native Spanish speaker since it is such an integral part of the language and meaning depends on it.

David. You're right, but anyhow that rule in Spanish is indifferent, I mean, in fact the sentence has the same meaning but they never missing the sense, the two phrases means the same, but the second one is the more correct.

For me it isn't more correct...
I prefer "Estoy seguro que vas a ganar" than ""Estoy seguro de que vas a ganar" .. "de" is not neccesary at all and, for me, it sounds bad. (there was a good article about that.. i will search for it)

Personally i almost never "relax" too much the language and my friends and family either (you can say quick and informal things whitout needing to make a language fault). It depends a lot of the education and the tradition of the zone.

As the other ones said, spanish has a lot of optiones..
-¿comemos?
in context, same as:
-¡comamos!