Day 15 of 90
Shopping
Half of shopping is pointing at something and naming it. Spanish gives you three degrees of pointing where English gives you two, and the third one is more useful than it sounds.
Three distances
Near me, near you, near neither of us.
The three degrees map onto the three people in a conversation: este belongs to me, ese belongs to you, aquel belongs to neither. That is why ese is not simply that, it is that near you, and pointing at something across the shop with ese sounds slightly off where aquel is exact.
Colours
Adjectives, so they agree, and two of them do not.
The colours that come from nouns behave like nouns. naranja is an orange and rosa is a rose, so dos camisas naranja is really two orange-coloured shirts, and there is nothing there to make plural. Both dos camisas naranjas and naranja are heard, and neither will be corrected, but the unchanged form is the more careful one.
Buying
The exchange, end to end.
solo estoy mirando uses estar rather than ser, because looking is what you are doing right now rather than what you are. This is one of the places the continuous form is genuinely correct in Spanish, since it describes an activity in progress at this moment, which is exactly the narrow job it has.
Clothing and shoe sizes use European numbering across most of the Spanish speaking world, so a UK size 8 shoe is a 42 and a US women's 10 is a 41. Mexico uses its own shoe scale, closer to the US one. It is worth knowing your European size before you travel, because ¿qué número usa? is the question you will be asked and hesitating over it is the awkward part, not the Spanish.
Carry these forward
Four lines from today that later days assume you know.
Check yourself
Eight questions. Finishing them marks the day done.
Question 1 of 8
You point at something across the room, near nobody. You say
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