Breakdown of Recién llegamos al mercadillo del centro.
al
to the
llegar
to arrive
el centro
downtown
del
from the / of the
recién
freshly / just (recién hecho: freshly made)
el mercadillo
street market
Questions & Answers about Recién llegamos al mercadillo del centro.
How does recién mean "we just arrived"? Shouldn't it be acabamos de llegar?
In Latin American Spanish, it is very common to use recién directly before a conjugated verb to mean that an action just happened. While acabar de plus an infinitive is also perfectly correct, using recién this way is a regional staple you will hear constantly.
Is llegamos in the present or past tense here?
What is the difference between a mercado and a mercadillo?
Adding the diminutive suffix -illo to mercado changes the meaning from a standard indoor market to a street market, flea market, or open-air bazaar. Suffixes like -illo and -ito frequently create distinct but related vocabulary words, not just smaller versions of the original.
Why is "downtown" translated as del centro?
In Spanish, the downtown area of a city is the noun phrase el centro. To describe a place located there, you use de plus the noun (literally "of the center"), which contracts to del centro. Spanish uses these prepositional phrases because it cannot stack nouns together like English does with "downtown street market".
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