Translation:Last Tuesday we practiced for the concert.
Im not sure what the other guy means.. so here is my take
Jugar is literally to play, you play with the ball, with the children, etc
Practicar is, like here, literally to practise, that however has a double meaning in english: one can practise more in the form of rehearsal (like here for the concert), but one can also practise football, as you note, however, most english speaker will sooner say play in that case
Its nice to see that double meaning return in spanish :)
Hints are taken directly from a dictionary and do not always reflect the specific usage in a sentence. "Practicamos para el concierto" conveys the idea of rehearsal, so 'practiced' or 'rehearsed' would be acceptable, 'played' is not.
Hints are still quite useful, but they offer guidance, so to speak, rather than give us the correct answer.
I'm a at a bit of a loss on this one. I've done a bit of Googling and haven't found a solid consensus that provided clarity over the various sites. Having said that, I did come across a couple of sites that suggested that when playing a sport that involved balls, pucks, badminton birdies or some such, the verb "jugar" is used. In other sports, such as figure skating or swimming, "practicar" is used. Mind you, "practicar" seems to be used with ball sports when you are going to actually practice playing the game.
Im not 100% on this, maybe someone can verify, but this is how I understand it.
The only difference between English and Spanish is when referring to instruments, here you would only use practicar and not jugar.
For swimming and skating and such like you would not use 'to play' in English, we would say 'to go swimming', and in Spanish they do not use 'jugar'. Instead it is used as you would a normal verb, you can also say 'ir a nadar' in Spanish. They use the infinitive as we dont have gerunds in Spanish ('swimming' here is gerund).
'Practicar' is used just as you would use 'to practice' in English. Hopefully, this helps someone.
"The only difference between English and Spanish is when referring to instruments, here you would only use practicar and not jugar."
Except as a musician hired to work a concert you could say "Last Tuesday we played for a concert." In that case, would you use tocar?
"El martes pasado nosotros tocamos para el concierto."
Estaban, I'm guessing Duo includes nosotros/as as a reminder of "why" the amos/emos/imos form of the verb is used. It's not to make the sentence formal. Using the subject pronoun doesn't do that--it's simply a reminder to use the first-person plural form.
I find Duo's generally using subject pronouns very annoying, especially with "type what you hear" and "type in English" prompts. I'm trying to learn the Spanish sound patterns, as well as sight patterns. When Duo includes the subject pronoun in what I hear, I have to go back and do a number of repetitions without the subject pronoun, because they're rarely used in "real" Spanish. Then, I'm never sure I have the sound pattern correct for the rest of the sentence. A real disappointment with DL!
Okay, I imagine it doesn't feel good to be mistaken. Even so, it's good for the soul when you experience your feelings, regardless of whether the feelings are pleasing to feel or displeasing to feel.
Regarding the fine line, sure. It's a fine line sometimes. There is a silver lining in the clouds though. As time goes by, I am slowly becoming better at making myself clear to my audience.
Your translation is not colloquial English because you included one word at the beginning that you should have omitted. (The)
Aside from your English mistake, your error also serves as an example of why it is important to study the Spanish & English definite article.
There are a lot of students of the Spanish language who don't study the Spanish definite article.
“Played” is given as an option because that is the way that the word is commonly used it Spanish. In English, however, the word is more usually meant to rehearse something or to do something in order to improve ones skills at it.
Both usages stem from the Greek work where practise means to carry out an action. It's just that Spanish and English have diverged a liltte in their expansion of the use of the words.
Here, “para” indicates that we were doing something as preparation for the concert rather than playing in it at the time.
El martes pasado nosotros tocamos para el concierto - Last Tuesday we played for the concert.