What does “hacer perder el tiempo” mean in Spanish?
Niña tiene una visión y algo feo pasa
A2 Spanish listening practice · Mexican Spanish · Picked for people who know a little
Hacer usually means “to do” or “to make,” but paired directly with another infinitive it builds a causative: hacer + verb means “to make someone do that verb.” In this clip, a kid ignored after warning about a snake gets dismissed with no me hagas perder el tiempo — literally “don’t make me lose the time,” meaning “don’t waste my time.” The whole meaning rides on that hacer + infinitive pairing, with no extra word for “waste” needed.
The same pattern builds dozens of everyday expressions: hacer reír (“to make [someone] laugh”), hacer llorar (“to make cry”), hacer pensar (“to make think”) — hacer plus any infinitive turns it into “cause to happen.” Once that pattern clicks, hacer perder el tiempo stops looking like a fixed phrase to memorize and starts looking like one instance of a rule that works everywhere.
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Harder words in this video
These words are harder than A2. Here is what they mean.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-ESP 2011 (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.