¿No te ha llegado mi correo electronico?

So there I was, just chatting away, and then the big question came - "¿no te ha llegado mi email?" .

Wow. It looks so simple seeing the words typed out on the screen. But at the time, all I heard was "llegado" and "email". Thankfully I'm becoming somewhat skilled at avoiding the "deer in headlights" look, and I was able to put two and two together (without having a blank stare for more than 2 seconds) and figure out that my amiga was asking me if I got her email. Which I didn't, for those of you who are truly curious. Anyway, up until then, I had only used recibir when talking about receiving email. And to be honest, I haven't had a whole lot of conversations about email in the first place.

Of course, I decided I need to figure this whole thing out. So here's what I learned...

It's very common to use llegar to talk about receiving email, as well as recibir. In fact, you can use them to talk about receiving letters too. But when you use llegar, it has to go with a pronoun - llegarte, llegarme, llegarle. You don't need the pronoun for recibir.

Hmmm...all this talk about pronouns sounds way too much like grammar, so let's look at some examples using both llegar and recibir:

I got an email yesterday

Me llegó un email ayer
Me ha llegado un email ayer
Recibí un email ayer

I got your email

Me ha llegado tu email
Me llegó tu email
He recibido tu email
Recibí tu email
Sí, lo recibí

You haven't gotten my email?

¿No te ha llegado mi email?
¿No te llegó mi email?
¿No ha recibido mi email?
¿No recibiste mi email?

I haven't gotten your email

No me ha llegado tu email
No me llegó tu email
No recibí tu email
No he recibido tu email

My Colombian friend and the kind folks at Word Reference helped me out a lot. I've posted much of the information from Word Reference here already, but there's a note or two in the thread I started over there that's worth taking a look at. Haz clic aquí to see my thread.

So that it's it. Pan comido, right? ¡Hasta la proxima!