Question 1

How does debe tomar work to mean "must take"?

Accepted Answer

The verb deber expresses obligation or strong advice, meaning "must", "should", or "ought to". To say what someone must do, you conjugate deber (in this case, debe to match Usted) and follow it immediately with an infinitive verb, which is the basic dictionary form of the action. That is why we use the unchanged infinitive tomar right after debe.

Question 2

Could I say Usted tiene que tomar instead of Usted debe tomar?

Accepted Answer

Yes! Using tener que followed by an infinitive is another common way to say someone "has to" do something. In this sentence, debe sounds a bit more like strong professional advice, like a doctor telling a patient what they must do for their health, while tiene que can sound like a strict, unavoidable requirement. Both are perfectly fine to use.

Question 3

I thought tomar meant "to drink". Why is it used for taking pills?

Accepted Answer

While tomar is the standard word for drinking beverages in Latin America, its wider meaning is "to take" or "to ingest". In Spanish, you will always use tomar rather than other verbs like llevar or agarrar when talking about taking medicine, pills, or vitamins.

Question 4

Why does the sentence use su for the medicine but sus for the vitamins?

Accepted Answer

In Spanish, possessive adjectives like su (meaning your, his, her, or their) have to match the quantity of the items being owned, not the person who owns them. Because medicina is a single item, we use the singular su. Because vitaminas is plural, we must add an "s" to make it sus vitaminas.

Usted debe tomar su medicina y sus vitaminas.

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