Spanish is one language most English speakers in the United States are probably familiar with. It’s the second most common language in the country. Because of that, it’s also incredibly useful to learn. Plus, it’s a beautiful language and among the easier languages for an English speaker to pick up.
The Basics
Sentence Structure/Word Order - This one is a little confusing because Spanish word order is mostly like English (Subject-Verb-Object, SVO), but there are notable exceptions. Most important among those exceptions is that the adjective usually follows the noun it describes, which is the exact opposite of the order in English. So to say “a red book,” you’d say “un libro rojo.” The order that adjectives appear if you are using more than one (“a big red book,” for example) also differs, but that’s a bit too nuanced for this overview.
Basic Pronouns & Possessive Pronouns - Pronouns are relatively straightforward in Spanish. They are consistent and used in the same way they are in English. For more details (and there aren’t many), check out the guide. (coming soon)
New Letters and Pronunciation - There are only a few “new” letters in Spanish, and they are probably familiar to you already. Ñ sounds like an approximation of “ny” and ll (which used to be its own separate letter) is pronounced as an English “y.” Additionally, j makes the “h” sound, but h is usually silent. It sounds like a lot but after a little practice, it’s not hard at all. For now, just focus on these:
Letter | English Equivalent |
h | Usually silent |
j | h |
ll | y |
ñ | ny or nya |
x | h |
Of course, in addition to the basic letter sounds, several of the other letters do not behave as we are used to seeing in English. The good news is Spanish pronunciation is way more consistent than English. The bad news is it’s not always intuitive, but it shouldn’t take long for it to become second nature with a little practice early on. The best way to familiarize yourself with the sounds of Spanish is to find some YouTube videos on Spanish pronunciation and watch them over and over. I’m going to leave off here because it’s so much easier to learn pronunciation from a video rather than a written guide.
Verbs
Verbs in Spanish behave pretty much the same way verbs behave in English. To begin, you need to be able to identify verbs in their infinitive form, which is how you’ll find them in a dictionary. It’s also what dictates their endings in the different tenses.
The endings: Spanish verbs in their most basic form (“the infinitive”) end in one of three ways:
-ar
-er
-ir
Whenever you see a word ending in ar/er/ir, it’s a verb. The endings for each group of verbs are slightly different in most tenses, so it’s important to pay attention to which vowel comes before that final r.
Tenses & Moods (If you want to know the difference between a tense and a mood, you can find that here.) (coming soon) Spanish has 3 basic tenses (Present, Past, Future) and each is further divided by mood (that’s perfect vs imperfect -- in other words, whether or not the action has been completed or is ongoing).
Present
Present Indicative - I study.
Present Progressive - I am studying.
Past - has 2 moods
Preterit - I studied. The action is in the past and also ended in the past. The Preterit is for a more definite or singular period of time.
Imperfect - I was studying. Or I used to study. The action is in the past and it either went on for a longer period of time than in the Preterit, or it was a recurring action in the past. Think of it as ambiguous or less specific. You know it was in the past, but it’s a little murky how long it took place.
Pluperfect - I have studied.
Future - I will study.
Future Perfect - I will have studied.
Imperative - Study! I think this might technically be a mood, but we called it a tense in school, so I’m calling it a tense here.
Subjunctive - Ditto. This is also one to watch out for because we don’t use the subjunctive much in English but it’s quite prevalent in Spanish. For that reason, it’s often confusing to English speakers. I don’t have a great example for Subjunctive. Maybe something along the lines of Had I studied… or Were I to study…
Irregular Verbs - There aren’t a ton of irregular verbs in Spanish compared to other languages (looking at you, Russian), and many of the irregular verbs are what I’d call regularly irregular. In other words, many irregular verbs have similar conjugation patterns, even if those patterns aren’t the “regular” pattern.
Nouns
There’s only one unexpected thing when it comes to nouns in Spanish: they have gender. All of them, not just the animate objects. A house (casa) is feminine, while a cat (gato) is masculine. Luckily, most of them are easy to predict: if a word ends in -a, it’s (probably) feminine. If it ends in -o, it’s (probably) masculine. There are, of course, exceptions.
The gender of nouns is critical to understand because the adjectives that describe the nouns change to match the gender of the noun. Will you be understood if you ignore grammatical gender? Yes, probably so. But it’s an integral facet of Spanish, so it’s worth learning.
Pronouns
Pronouns are pretty straightforward, being more or less a matter of memorization. There are only two types: Personal Pronouns and Possessive Pronouns.
Adjectives
Adjectives like to be "matchy-matchy" with their nouns. It’s the mother/daughter pageant of the grammar world
Match them with their nouns based on both:
Gender
Number
Word placement - usually after the noun
There are some exceptions to this rule, but we’ll cover them in more detail in when we talk about adjectives.
Adverbs
Adverbs are pretty straightforward. They behave similarly to English adverbs.
The Details
We won’t get into these in depth in this post, but here are some sticky points to look out for as you are learning. They confuse a lot of people, so look out for them and make sure
Por vs Para
Unusual uses of tener (tengo __ años, tengo hambre, etc.)
Aqui vs Aquel vs Aquella (Here vs There vs Over There)
Diminutives and Augmentatives
A few of my favorite study techniques
I’m working on teaching my kids Spanish these days and I’ve found a few study methods that we really enjoy as a family. Here are two of my favorites:
Let’s have Sobremesa!
Spanglish
Comments