Breakdown of ¿Estará roto el vagón? Va lentísimo antes de la caída.
de
from / of
estar
to be (location/state)
ir
to go
romper
to break
lento
slow
antes
before / earlier
la caída
the drop / the fall
el vagón
the car (train) / the carriage
Questions & Answers about ¿Estará roto el vagón? Va lentísimo antes de la caída.
Why is lentísimo used for "extremely slowly" instead of an adverb ending in -mente?
In everyday Spanish, people often use the masculine singular form of an adjective as an adverb. Instead of saying lentísimamente (which sounds very long and clunky), you can just take the adjective lento, drop the final -o, and add -ísimo to get lentísimo (meaning "extremely slowly").
Why does the sentence use the future tense estará to ask "Could the car be broken?" right now?
This is a common feature called the future of probability. When you want to make a guess or wonder out loud about something happening in the present, you use the future tense. ¿Estará roto? translates literally to "Will it be broken?" but is actually used to say "I wonder if it is broken?" or "Could it be broken?".
The English translation says "It is going," so why use va instead of the progressive está yendo?
With verbs of motion like ir (to go) and venir (to come), Spanish strongly prefers the simple present tense (va) to talk about what is happening right now. You could grammatically say está yendo, but va sounds much more natural for "it is going."
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