Before nipping away from the dinner table at home, you’d most likely say something like “I’ll be right back”.

What, then, would be the optimal way to express this same idea in Spanish?

A natural way to introduce new ideas into English conversations is with the expression “the [x] thing” – as in: “the good thing”, “the bad thing”, or “the crazy thing”.

But how can we do the same in Spanish? Quite easily, it turns out.

The subjunctive. It’s the stuff of Spanish students’ nightmares.

But learn this little language trick, using the subjunctive, and it might make you hate this mysterious grammatical concept a little less.

Make the odd tweak to your Spanish and you can have a big impact on what native speakers think of you.

Read on to discover how you can easily speak about how long you’ve been doing a given activity.

Our trusted friends, the textbooks, teach us beautifully formal ways to order things in Spanish that people rarely (if ever) use in real life.

Here’s how you should go about ordering things in Spanish.

The grammatically perfect, literal translation, of “should have” will be understood, but it’ll get you tripping over your tongue in short order.

There is a simpler way to express this, which you may not have been told.