Mastering SHOULD and SHOULDA in Spanish

Hey everybody, Kiru Paul here. I recently made a video about would and would have, how to translate those into Spanish. So now it's time for the next logical step, should and should have. Now the verb we're going to be playing with today is deber and it can mean should or must. Now some people get confused like which tense to use and what's the exact meaning, but you won't after this video I assure you. I'm going to be breaking it down into little categories and showing you some formulas you can add to your word list. Now I'm going to go ahead and kick this thing off with the most common way that we say should and that's when we give advice and recommendations. And for this one, we're going to be using deber in the conditional tense. Deberías descansar más. You should rest more. Deberías hablar con ella. You should talk to her. You see, this is great for giving advice and recommendations, right? This is also a good one if you're just talking about what you should do. Yo debería lavar el carro. I should wash the car. Before I move on to the next category, I just want to take a moment to talk about the sponsor of this video, Lingopi. It is a fantastic tool for anyone learning Spanish to help you work on your listening comprehension. And we all know that that is one of the most challenging aspects of learning any language. With Lingopi, you're going to be able to stream television shows and, you know, movies from Spanish-speaking countries and not just watch them. It's a very interactive portal they have here. It's all geared towards language learning. One thing I really like about it is that you can search for programming by Spanish-speaking country. For example, if I'm, you know, studying European Spanish, I'll click here on Spain and I get all of this programming here. And for you folks who are studying European Spanish, there is a series on here, kind of a telenovela that's pretty good. It's about the police. Servir y proteger. I recommend it. You know, it's pretty good. Now, when you're actually using the service, you have a lot of flexibility. You can have it to where you can see the Spanish. You could have it where you see the Spanish and the English. You can have it where you don't see any of it. And if you don't know a word, you can always click on it and it will tell you what it is. I have the volume turned down right now. Anytime you click on a word or phrase, it's automatically added to your word list so you can practice it later. Another neat feature that they've added is the ability to practice your own pronunciation. So I can click on any word or phrase. En la esencia. And practice pronunciation. En la esencia. It gave me 100 out of 100. That's pretty good. Now, after watching a couple shows, chances are you have a lot of words and phrases on your list. So you can come over to practice. And you can do flashcards, pop quizzes. There's all kinds of tools here. So that's Lingopi. It is a solid option if you want to work on your listening comprehension. You can try it free for seven days. You're going to find my link to it in the description section of this video. And also pinned to the top of the comments. Alright, let's go ahead and jump back into this. Our next category is deber in the present tense. And this is how we're going to translate must. As in like, have to. Yo debo ir a la tienda. I must go to the store. Debes estudiar más. You must study more. Él debe ser honesto. He must be honest. See, this is obligation. Our next category is when we're using must as in supposing something. Taking a guess. Like, you must be tired. You're going to be doing this in Spanish as well. And there's two ways to do it. One is with just the verb deber by itself. And the other way is with deber de. So, if I want to translate, you must be tired. You know, I'm just guessing. I'm supposing. You must be tired. I could do it as, Debes estar cansado. Or, Debes de estar cansado. Either way. Now, when we're using deber in the present tense like this, you saw before that it can mean obligation. And here it doesn't mean obligation. But the context is telling us what we mean. Now, when we use deber de, that can only be used for this kind of thing. For supposing something. For guessing something. So, Debes de estar cansado. That can fit. Now, if you don't want to be like, Oh, when should I use deber de? Should I put the de? You can just use deber. Now, one thing I will say about deber de plus infinitive. You're going to hear it misused by native speakers sometimes. I'll hear people use it as in obligation. You know, Debes de estudiar más. And that's not correct Spanish. Don't do that. Maria must be home. But again, we don't need the de. Let's move on to our next category. And in this one, we have deber in the future tense. Now, this is not something that you're going to be, you know, saying. But you're going to be seeing it a lot. Okay. It's going to be used on signs, official documents. And it expresses obligation. It's not, Hey, you should do this. You must do this. This must happen. The passenger must arrive 30 minutes before departure. And I know the English sounds a little odd there. Would you say passengers should arrive 30 minutes before departure? Yes. But a lot of times in signage, when you see this verb, you're going to see singular like that. The driver must carry their license. Okay. Just something you'll commonly see. Again, you won't be saying this one. You'll just be reading it. All right. Let's go ahead and move on to should have. There's a few ways that we can express should have. We're going to start with the most common way, universally accepted across the Spanish-speaking world. And that is to use deber in the conditional, plus our helping verb haber, right? And then the past participle. And don't let all the grammatical terms throw you off or anything. It just helps, you know, for little formulas. All right. I think examples are the way to go. Let's just do examples. Deberías haberme llamado. You should have called me. See, the haber is the have part. Yo debería haber estudiado más. I should have studied more. Ella debería haber salido antes. She should have left before, earlier. Now, another way we can express this is taking deber and putting it into the preterite. And this means we should have done something and didn't. Now, you'll see this one with haber and then without haber, just the infinitive after it. So you may see, Debí haber estudiado más. I should have studied more. Or just, Debí estudiar más. I should have studied more. Now, another way that you'll hear native speakers express should have doesn't use the verb deber at all. It actually uses just haber, but in the imperfect subjunctive. That's the past tense of the subjunctive. And it's going to be hubiera plus your past participle. Yo hubiera llamado. I should have called. Si hubiera, that is in the imperfect subjunctive. Ellos hubieran dicho algo. They should have said something. Now, since about 20% of my viewers are studying European Spanish, I want to include a construction that's very common in Spain, but not as common in Latin America. And this one doesn't use deber either. Yo tenía que haber llamado. I should have called. Yo tenía que haber llegado temprano. I should have arrived early. You may also hear it in the conditional form. Tendría que haber llamado. Now, that's it for the video. I've covered a lot in here. If you enjoyed it, just do me a favor and give it a thumbs up. And until next time, hasta luego.