Breakdown of Él debe dejar de mirar el celular porque arruina la película.
él
he
mirar
to look at / to watch
la película
movie
porque
because
deber
must / should
dejar
to stop / to leave (something behind)
el celular
the cell phone
arruinar
to ruin
Questions & Answers about Él debe dejar de mirar el celular porque arruina la película.
Why do we use dejar de instead of parar to say "stop looking"?
The phrase dejar de followed by an infinitive is the standard way to express stopping or quitting an action. While parar generally means to physically halt a movement, dejar de mirar expresses that he needs to break the continuous action of looking at his screen.
How does the grammar work when stringing three verbs together like debe dejar de mirar?
When you chain verbs together, only the first verb is conjugated. Here, debe is conjugated to match él. The following verbs stay in their infinitive form. The structure is the conjugated modal verb (debe) plus the set phrase dejar de, followed by the action being stopped (mirar).
In English we say looking "at" the cell phone. Why is there no preposition for "at" in mirar el celular?
The Spanish verb mirar translates directly to "to look at" or "to watch". Because "at" is already built into the meaning of the verb, you do not add an extra preposition when looking at an inanimate object like el celular.
What is the subject of arruina at the end of the sentence?
The subject is an implied "it", which refers to the entire situation of him looking at his phone. Spanish does not use a subject pronoun for "it", so you simply use the third-person singular conjugation arruina right after porque.
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