Compro un vestido nuevo, y lo llevo cuando queremos salir a cenar.

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Breakdown of Compro un vestido nuevo, y lo llevo cuando queremos salir a cenar.

• querer: to want
• un: a
• cuando: when
• nuevo: new
• nosotros: we
• a: to
• y: and
• comprar: to buy
• el vestido: the dress
• llevar: to wear
• salir: to go out
• cenar: to have dinner

Questions & Answers about Compro un vestido nuevo, y lo llevo cuando queremos salir a cenar.

Why does the sentence use lo as the direct object pronoun instead of something else?

In Spanish, lo is the masculine singular direct object pronoun. Since vestido is a masculine noun, lo replaces un vestido in the sentence. If it were a feminine noun instead (for example, falda), you would use la.

Why is the present tense (compro / llevo) used here, even though it seems to refer to some future context (e.g., wearing the dress when going out for dinner later)?

In Spanish, it’s quite common to use the present tense to indicate a near-future action. It conveys an intention or a plan clearly, much like saying I’m buying in English can mean I intend to buy soon. There’s no strict need for a separate future tense here unless you want to emphasize something specific about the future.

Could I say uso instead of llevo?

You could say uso to mean I use/I wear, but llevo is more idiomatic when talking about putting on clothes in Spanish. Llevar often implies to wear, and it feels natural in everyday speech. Uso is perfectly understandable but slightly less common in this context.

Why is the article un used for vestido instead of el?

Using un (indefinite article) shows you’re talking about a (singular, unspecified) dress rather than a specific one. If you’d already identified this dress before in the conversation, you might say el vestido nuevo (the new dress).

Why do we say queremos instead of queráis or something else?

Because the subject here is nosotros (we), which naturally conjugates to queremos in the present tense. Forms like queréis (with an accent) or queráis show up in the vosotros form or in the subjunctive, which isn’t the context here. If you were in a region that uses vosotros, you could say queréis if the subject was specifically you all (informal). But in standard Spain Spanish when saying we want, you say queremos.