Breakdown of Quería que plantaran árboles en el parque comunitario.
en
in / on / at
el árbol
the tree
el parque
the park
querer
to want
que
that / than
comunitario
community
plantar
to plant
Questions & Answers about Quería que plantaran árboles en el parque comunitario.
How exactly do we form plantaran in this sentence?
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?
The spoken stress stays on the exact same syllable: the 'ar'. In the singular árbol, the stress is on the second-to-last syllable. When we add -es to make it plural, that stressed 'ar' becomes the third-to-last syllable. Spanish spelling rules state that any word stressed on the third-to-last syllable must always carry a written accent mark.
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