Spanish Grammar

Nouns in Spanish

Spanish language is very much unlike English in a sense that Spanish nouns have a gender; there are both masculine and feminine ways of putting forth a noun. The masculine nouns have an “el” and the feminine noun has a “la” preceding it.

Nouns that are feminine start with a stressed a- or ha- get the masculine article el, despite the fact that the noun is still feminine.

Plurals

The noun functions are: The specific articles of el and la turn into los and las. Nouns end with a vowel happen to become plurals by adding s, let us look an example

el gato gets changed into los gatos

Wherever the noun ends with a consonant, then “-es” is added, for example:

El color gets changed to los colores

Those nouns that end with a -z transform their ending to -ces in the plural form, for example.

el lápiz gets changed to los lápices

Adjectives

Adjectives usually follow the noun that they portray in the Spanish language, for example we have “la manzana roja” which means the red apple in English.

In Spanish adjectives also echo the gender of the noun they depict. To make an adjective feminine, the masculine “-o” ending is altered to -a; and the endings of -án, -ón, -or, -és are altered to -ana, -ona, -ora, -esa. In order to make an adjective plural, a -s is added to the singular form of the word if it ends in a vowel. If the adjective ends in a consonant, the -es is added:

There is no specific difference between his and her in the Spanish language, for example we have “su billete” which can mean either his or her ticket.

Pronouns

The subject pronouns are usually omitted in the Spanish language; this is because the verb ending plays the part of distinguishing the subject. Let us look at some of the cases and the examples below.

Hablo means I speak In Spanish and
hablamos means we speak

But the case is that they are mainly used for importance or to steer clear of confusion:

The object pronouns are positioned before the verb in the Spanish language:

la veo means I see her
los conocemos means we know them

The object pronouns seen above can be utilized in phrases to mean me, for us, etc. But to him/to her is le and to them is les. If le and les happen in combination with lo/la/las/los then le/les we have to change to se, e.g. se lo doy. These are the rules to be followed strictly.

Verbs

There are mainly three patterns of endings that can be used for Spanish verbs. These are –ar, -er or –ir, each signifies a different meaning altogether and care has to taken while using them so that they turn out to be accurate.

cantar means “sing” in Spanish, let us look at some of the other forms of expressing it.

canto means I sing
cantas means you sing
cantamos means we sing
cantaís again means you sing

vivir means “to live” in Spanish, let us look at some of the other ways in which we can use this phrase.

Vivo means I live
vives means you live
vivís again means you live

Although this may sound a bit confusing, you would get accustomed once you start speaking Spanish as most of these terms are context based and the skills to speak those correctly can only be developed by speaking the language itself.

There are two ways I which you can address people in Spanish, this is very much like the French language. The two forms are the polite form and the familiar form, the former one is used when speaking to people you do not know much and the later is used in places where you know the person whom you are speaking to quite well. In the polite form you usually tend to use singular and in the familiar tome you used plural, the informal words that are usually to refer to “you” are tú (singular) and vosotros (plural).

The verb "to be"

There are two dissimilar Spanish verbs that are used as ser and estar, this again depends on the context of the speech, the state of the speech is taken to decide what to use i.e. it is first determined if the state is permanent or temporary as shown in the example below. Ser is used to describe a permanent state, and Estar is used to explain a temporary state or where something is located.

Past tense in Spanish

To form the simple past tense, I gave/I have given, I finished/I have finished, combine the present tense of the verb haber &endash; to have with the past participle of the verb (cantado, comido, vivido):

We can easily form the past tense using the present tense of the verb at hand. We can use the tense of the verb like the “haber” which means “have” to show the tense of a particular phrase.

For example: hemos vivido means we lived or we have lived.