"I use to go": why Spanish soler doesn't fit into used to

You're telling a coworker in Dublin what your Sundays look like, and out comes: "I use to go to the market on Sundays." She asks why you stopped going. You meant to describe your routine now, and it sounded like a habit you'd lost.

The culprit is soler. In Spanish, soler lives in the present (suelo) and in the past (solía); in English, the habit sense of used to only lives in the past. Cambridge puts it flatly: used to "always refers to past time", and it marks "We use to go" as wrong. Suelo is I usually; solía is very often the simple past, or used to, or would for actions; estoy acostumbrado a is I'm used to + -ing; me acostumbré is I got used to + -ing.

"I use to" or "I usually"? How to say "suelo" in English#

For a habit you have now, English uses the simple present with a frequency adverb: I usually go. A present-tense use to doesn't exist in today's English; in the 16th century there was a present use to / uses to, but it died out.

Marta Garcia-Puig, who preps students for the First Certificate in the Barcelona area, calls it a fairly common mistake and traces it to soler: Spanish and Catalan speakers say "I don't use to drink alcohol" because no suelo beber works just as well as solía beber.

Wrong: "I don't use to eat breakfast, just a coffee."
Right: "I don't usually eat breakfast, just a coffee."

Sofía blurts it out during her first week at an office in Austin, when a coworker offers her donuts at nine. With usually she says what she meant: today, like always, just coffee.

According to the research team at Cambridge University Press, using present tenses instead of past tenses, and vice versa, is "the second most common grammatical error for Spanish learners". That report doesn't mention use to, but the slip comes from the same present/past crossover.

Does "solía" always become used to?#

No. When natives talk about past habits, they mostly use the simple past. Sali Tagliamonte and Helen Lawrence studied spoken English in York, and according to the summary of their work on yorkshiredialect.com, about 70% of past habits were expressed with the simple past, 19% with used to, and 6% with would. Solía ir a la playa cada verano is perfectly natural as I went to the beach every summer.

Between used to and would, used to wins. In American English (the COCA corpus), Sophia Aakjær Juul counted 1,059 cases of used to (69.9%) against 454 of would (30.1%). Used to opens the story and would carries it on: according to Cambridge, used to comes first because it "sets the scene".

Wrong: "When I was a kid in Monterrey, we would have a dog called Chispa."
Right: "When I was a kid in Monterrey, we had a dog called Chispa."

Mateo says it to his girlfriend's family in Leeds, and the would turns the dog into a hypothetical one. Would only works for repeated actions, never for states: "We used to live in Manchester," not "We would live in Manchester". With actions it fits: "Every Sunday, Chispa would wait for us at the door."

"I'm used to" and "I got used to": when used to means getting accustomed#

Be used to is a different construction, and it works in any tense. It means estar acostumbrado a, and according to Cambridge it's followed by a noun, a pronoun, or an -ing verb; get used to names the process, acostumbrarse. Cambridge marks "We are used to go" as wrong.

Wrong: "Don't worry, I'm used to work night shifts."
Right: "Don't worry, I'm used to working night shifts."

Javier, who has worked nights for years, says it to his manager at a warehouse in Birmingham. A new hire three weeks in describes the process: "I got used to working nights", me acostumbré.

Why "use to" and "used to" sound the same#

You can't hear the -d in used to. Cambridge transcribes the American pronunciation as /ˈjus.tu/, with /s/, not the /z/ of the verb use; Tagliamonte and Lawrence explain in their paper that the voiceless [t] devoices the consonant before it. That's why I used to go and I use to go sound identical, and why even native speakers sometimes write use to.

With didn't, even native speakers can't agree. In a 2010 Language Log post, University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman published a reader's rough Google counts: didn't used to be beat didn't use to be by about 13 to 1 in the UK and 7 to 1 in the US. In Liberman's words, used to has been "part-way re-analyzed as an aspectual auxiliary": a fixed unit, not the past tense of use.

Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky summed it up on the American Dialect Society mailing list: "i believe that rational people could disagree on this point, and there is in fact no established convention". According to the Language Portal of Canada, Canadian and American speech prefers didn't use to, while didn't used to is common in Britain. For exams, Cambridge recommends didn't use to, the form Merriam-Webster lists.

Could you say "I usually take the train, but I used to drive" out loud right now, without thinking? Knowing the rule isn't enough if your mouth is still translating suelo when you speak. Tabla trains exactly that step: you see the sentence in Spanish, say it in English out loud, and its adaptive review brings it back before you'd forget it.

Translate: "Suelo correr por las mañanas, pero de niño odiaba el deporte y me costó acostumbrarme a madrugar."

"I usually run in the mornings, but as a kid I hated sports, and it took me a while to get used to getting up early." Suelo is present: usually. Odiaba is a past state: simple past or used to hate, never would hate. Acostumbrarme a madrugar calls for get used to + -ing.

Try this today: write three sentences about your current routine with usually and three about your childhood with the simple past or used to, then read them out loud without pronouncing the -d in used.