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Old August 28, 2017, 07:55 AM
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aleCcowaN aleCcowaN is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Native Language: Castellano
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Those triggers don't exist. They are just tricks to give the student time enough to apprehend the real inner working of the language (and trick in exams, as in the first courses they give some 70-80% of right answers without learning really anything).

Back to the examples, you have different use of the time frame and even different meaning of the words.

-Nunca tuvo dinero para pagar la renta ---> He never paid it [I would like to find a single real instance of this sentence in the Spanishphere]
-Nunca tenĂ­a dinero para pagar la renta.---> Such situation repeated month after month.

-Manuel nunca fue muy inteligente. ----> a comment made after Manny did something clumsy. [Here the speaker is underrating Manny]
-Manuel nunca era muy inteligente.----> Manny's choices were awful, and his lack of common sense made him take bad decisions once and again. [Here the speaker is underrating Manny's decisions, maybe just decisions about some specific subject]

ETA: I did the quiz. Considering the sentences to be part of a story, I only got a score of 20% -and I'm native Spanish speaker with an education in the first percentile-. Considering the sentences to be a story by themselves, I got 85%. If I knew the false triggers and just used them I think I would have gotten a score of 75%.
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Last edited by aleCcowaN; August 28, 2017 at 08:18 AM.
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