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Old August 15, 2012, 05:44 PM
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aleCcowaN aleCcowaN is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
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It is as JPablo explains. You should consider that this means "quiero" -exactly like in English- but politeness demands a certain degree of hesitation or a mild approach that vanishes any hint that evokes a command. You have two ways in Spanish: using imperfect subjunctive makes it uncertain and using conditional makes it hypothetical*, and both cases give the other person the possibility of refusing to provide what they're asked, hence it is polite.

* This is an oversimplification: subjunctive makes it "label of an action" and not the action itself -as Spanish indicative (very different to English indicative) is-, while conditional places it in a separate branch of reality -a speculative branch-.
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