Learn Spanish (Latin America): Quería que plantaran árboles en el parque comunitario. - I wanted them to plant trees in the community park.

Quería que plantaran árboles en el parque comunitario.

I wanted them to plant trees in the community park.

Breakdown of Quería que plantaran árboles en el parque comunitario.

Questions & Answers about Quería que plantaran árboles en el parque comunitario.

How exactly do we form plantaran in this sentence?

To form the imperfect subjunctive, we start with the third-person plural of the preterite tense, which is plantaron (they planted). We drop the -ron at the end to get our base stem, planta-. Finally, we add the imperfect subjunctive ending for 'they', which is -ran, giving us plantaran.

Why do we use the past subjunctive (plantaran) here instead of the present subjunctive (planten)?

The tense of the subjunctive verb depends on the main verb. Because the triggering verb quería (I wanted) is in a past tense, the subjunctive verb that follows must also be in the past. If the sentence were in the present ('I want them to plant...'), we would use the present subjunctive and say Quiero que planten....

Since quería can mean 'I wanted', 'he wanted', or 'she wanted', how do we know it means 'I wanted' here?

Without a pronoun like yo (I) or él (he), the meaning relies entirely on the surrounding context of the conversation. It is very common in Spanish to drop the subject pronoun if the listener already knows who is being talked about. If the subject was ambiguous, the speaker would simply add the pronoun, saying Yo quería que....

Why does the plural word árboles keep the written accent mark from the singular árbol?