Use 5 – For receiving the effects of something The idea of being about to ‘take a joke’ or ‘take someone’s ideas seriously’ is about judgement or determining what is right and wrong.Įnglish: You must take his threats seriously.Įspañol: Debes tomar en serio sus amenazas.Įnglish: It is difficult for me to take him seriously.Įspañol: Él no puede tomar una broma. The fourth use of tomar should be familiar to you from English.
Use 4 – To take in a judgement or understanding Often in combination with the word medidas (measures), you can use tomar to talk about taking up or using measures, strategies or precautions.Įnglish: We have to take up the necessary measures if we want to win the race.Įspañol: Tenemos que tomar las medidas necesarias si queremos ganar la carrera.Įnglish: In this situation, one must take precautions.Įspañol: En esta situación, hay que tomar precauciones. You can also use tomar to talk about gaining liberties that are physical such as gaining or catching your breath or metaphorical such as taking the liberty to do something.Įspañol: Tuve que parar para tomar el aliento.Įnglish: He took the liberty to share his thoughts with everyone.Įspañol: Él se tomó la libertad de compartir sus pensamientos con todo el mundo.Įnglish: The idea started to gain strength.Įspañol: La idea comenzó a tomar fuerza. Use 2 – To gain strength, freedom or take the liberty But, you can use it for talking about consuming vices such as chocolate and ice cream.Įspañol: Necesito tomar un poco de chocolate. You can’t really use tomar when you want to talk about consuming certain foods such as tapas or paella. One thing to note, you do have to be careful when using this verb for talking about eating. When you next get an opportunity, try asking a Spanish friend:Įnglish: Do you feel like going out to have something (a drink or a bite to eat)?Įspañol: ¿Te apetece salir para tomar algo? If you want to ask a really natural sounding question, test out the phrase ‘to have something’ which in Spanish is ‘ tomar algo‘. For example, in English, you could say ‘to have a drink’, ‘to have a glass of wine’ or ‘to have a piece of cheese’.Įnglish: Do you want to have a glass of wine or a coffee?Įspañol: ¿Quieres tomar una copa de vino o un café? In the context of eating and drinking tomar is used like the English phrase ‘to have a…’. If you would like to see the conjugations for this verb, try out my favourite Spanish verb conjugation tool here.
#TAKE A BREAK IN SPANISH HOW TO#
In this post, you’ll learn how to use this common regular Spanish verb for talking about having drinks, gaining strength or freedom, taking up certain measures and, as they say in the classics, much more. But, some strange things happen with the translation of this verb around food and common expressions. Generally, the Spanish verb tomar is the best equivalent of ‘to take’. In this post, you’ll see which of these ideas translate well to Spanish and which do not. In English we ‘take’ sugar with our coffees, we stop to ‘take’ a breath, we ‘take’ necessary measures and we ‘take’ our time. If you use tomar as the translation of the English verb ‘to take’, this will work well in some contexts but not all.
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