El médico recomienda beber agua fría.

The doctor recommends drinking cold water.

Breakdown of El médico recomienda beber agua fría.

• beber: to drink
• el agua: the water
• frío: cold
• el médico: the doctor
• recomendar: to recommend

Questions & Answers about El médico recomienda beber agua fría.

Why does the sentence begin with El médico? Can’t we just say Médico recomienda beber agua fría?

In Spanish, when you talk about a specific profession or a generic “the doctor,” you almost always use the definite article.

• El médico = “the doctor.”
  Dropping el (just Médico recomienda…) sounds ungrammatical.
  If you wanted to generalize all doctors, you’d pluralize and say Los médicos recomiendan beber agua fría.

Why is recomienda in the present indicative and followed by the infinitive beber instead of using a subjunctive clause?

Spanish allows two main structures after recomendar:
1) recomendar + infinitive when the subject of both verbs is the same or when the recommendation is general:

• El médico recomienda beber agua fría.
  2) recomendar + que + subjunctive when you specify someone who should do the action:
• El médico recomienda que bebas agua fría.

When should I use the infinitive “beber agua fría” vs. the subjunctive clause “que bebas agua fría”?

Use the infinitive version when the recommendation is general or impersonal (no explicit “you”):

• El médico recomienda beber agua fría. (“People in general should drink cold water.”)
  Use que + subjunctive when you point to a specific person or pronoun:
• El médico recomienda que tú bebas agua fría. (“The doctor recommends that you drink cold water.”)

Why doesn’t the sentence use an article before agua fría, like el agua fría?

1) General reference to liquids: after verbs such as beber, tomar, etc., Spanish usually drops the article when speaking of something in general—beber agua means “to drink water” (in general).
2) El vs. la: although agua is feminine, a singular stressed a- word uses el for phonetic reasons (el agua), but you still treat the noun as feminine. Here there is no article at all, because it’s a generic statement.

Why is fría ending in -a instead of -o or another form?

Adjectives in Spanish must agree in gender and number with the noun they modify. Agua is feminine singular, so the adjective takes the feminine singular ending: fría.

What’s the difference between beber agua fría and tomar agua fría? Can I use both verbs?

• Beber specifically means “to drink.”
• Tomar is more general (“to take” or “to drink”) and is extremely common in Latin America to mean “have something to drink.”
  In this context, both are correct:
• El médico recomienda beber agua fría.
• El médico recomienda tomar agua fría.

Can I say El doctor recomienda beber agua fría instead of El médico recomienda…?

Yes. Both el médico and el doctor mean “the doctor.”

• Médico is slightly more formal and technical.
• Doctor is very common in everyday speech across Latin America.

Why isn’t there a pronoun like te in El médico recomienda beber agua fría?

Because the sentence makes a general recommendation, it doesn’t address anyone in particular, so there’s no need for a dative pronoun. If you wanted to recommend directly to someone, you could add it:

• El médico te recomienda beber agua fría.