Prepositions - en, in, at

[kimma]

So prepositions in Spanish confuse me a little. Mostly that en is used where in English it could be at or in. Mostly when using at or in will give different meanings to the sentence.

For eg "i'm at the pool" is different to "I'm in the pool".

Am I right in thinking that when you use "en" it means the most likely/obvious meaning in context and if you want to clarify it is something else you would use a more precise preposition?

So if you wanted to say you're at the pool but be clear you're not actually swimming you'd say you're next to the pool? Or if you said you were en the local swimming pool it would be assumed you meant at the pool, inside the fence but not actually in the pool swimming because there would be additional context if you were.

Am I making sense?

Tl:dr - if en is ambiguous should you give extra context if you don't mean the most likely meaning?

[Rusty]

Context is always going to be applied to derive the correct meaning, so unless you see that you haven't provided enough context for correct understanding, don't sweat the details.

The Spanish speaker learning English has the same problems. The little words kill us all.

[kimma]

Just to sweat them a little, would you say that en really means "in the vicinity of" and you'd clarify with inside, outside, in front of, if that was relevant to the story?

I mean, that's probably what I do in English, just I don't have to think about it. :)

Bonus question: is the generic you (like I've been using in this comment) expressed with ustedes in Spanish?

Thanks for being so good about answering questions.

[Rusty]

The generic you, used when you aren't addressing a specific person, is stated with the non-personal 'se'.

That is what appeared in your paragraph in the other thread. Instead of translating it to the passive voice, as you did, you could have used 'you'. Another option would have been 'one'.
se usa = one uses / you use (non-personal usages)
se usa = it is used (English passive voice - Spanish pasiva refleja)
es usado = it is used (English passive voice - Spanish passive voice (not commonly used))