Hugo, since this is not a true statement, you’d phrase it like this: “If I had been born in South Korea, I would be 58 years old now.”

There really are a lot of irregular verbs in Spanish – I had no idea it was so much less in Portuguese!

*para tí y JR

Tks
Yes.. I’m not a specialist, but in portuguese, we have about 300 irregular verbes… in spanish it have more 2000 of them… to me it is difficult because of that… even though that two language is similar…. Sí mi amigo, esto deja los estudios más dificultoso, pero mas desafiante también 😁😁😁 salutos para ti JR

My pleasure! Instead of “by the simple fact that it ears nice” , you can say, “simply because it sounds right.” And does Spanish really have more verb tenses than Portuguese?

Hi Jeff… nice… very gratefully for all the explanation and all the details. I understood very well right now. Yes… you are right, as portuguese here we have a lot of constructions that we use without understantig why… by the simple fact that it ears nice. Tks in advance and good luck with spanish. I have been studying spanish for 5 years and it is very difficult, as portuguese, because has a lot of verbe tenses. tks

Rodrigo, it’s the English subjunctive. The subjunctive in English very rarely appears because the verb forms are very, very often the same in the indicative as in the subjunctive. Also, there are fewer opportunities to use the subjunctive in English, so 99% or more of English speakers don’t even know it exists.

Like in Portuguese, you would use the subjunctive after “It’s important that…” Here’s an example: “It’s important that we start on time.” This is the subjunctive, but you don’t notice it because “we start” is the same as in the indicative. There are only a few verbs that change form in the English subjunctive and “to be” is one of them. So you would say, “It’s important that we be on time.” And in the past, you would say, “If I were in South Korea, I would have been 43 yesterday” – this is the past subjunctive with “to be.” But in the past, as in the present, other verbs don’t change form in the subjunctive. I could say, “If I lived in South Korea, I would be 43” and it would be the same as the indicative.

Here are the things that change in the English subjunctive:

1. All verb forms with “he/she/it” drop the “s”: It’s important that he arrive on time.
2. All “to be” forms in the present become “be”: It’s important that we be at the airport at 9:00.
3. All “to be” forms in the past become “were”: If I were rich, I’d buy my mom a new car.

In every other case, the subjunctive is the same as the indicative.

Here is a good page that explains it more: https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/subjunctive.php

Most English speakers just kind of use their ear to know what sounds best without realizing it’s the subjunctive. In fact, many English speakers who learn Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or French…they learn the subjunctive in their new language without even realizing that the subjunctive exists in English, too. And now you know why the subjunctive was so hard for me to understand in Spanish – it’s a lot more prominent in romance languages than in English!