Lesson 7
Lesson 7
Lesson 7
The Spanish numbers are not difficult to learn. Even when there are some exceptions in the way to
form them, their construction follows rules that will allow students to learn them easily.
Here are the Spanish numbers:
100 - cien 101 - ciento uno 102 - ciento dos 110 - ciento
diez
111 - ciento once 200 - doscientos 201 - doscientos uno 202 - doscientos dos
211 - doscientos once 276 - doscientos setenta y seis 300 - trescientos
1.111 - mil ciento once 2.000 - dos mil 3.000.003 - tres millones tres
Lesson 8
This is our casa from the outside. Now, let's go in and find out how to describe it in español.
Let's see... this house has cinco rooms. From here, we can see la sala, la oficina, la cocina, el
dormitorio, and el baño.
Let's start with la sala. What's in this room? Hmmm… Yo veo (I see):
el sofá (sofa)
las cortinas (curtains)
la mesita (small table)
Lesson 9
Introduction
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified
("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for
tense, aspect, mood, person, and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number. Personal pronouns are inflected for
person, number, gender (including a residual neuter), and a very reduced case system; the Spanish
pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.
Lesson Content
There are certain points of Spanish grammar that one need to be familiar with. Learning
Spanish is not as complicated as English. One just need to get familiar of gender, word order,
adjective and noun agreement, verb changes, personal pronouns (singular or plural) and
capitalization.
1. Gender
Spanish has no neutral nouns in contrast to English which uses ‘the’ to refer to someone or
something regardless of gender.
Ex. Teacher - Maestro Kid - Nino (Masculine)
Teacher - Maestra Kid - Nina
( Feminine)
In most cases, there is no masculine or feminine gender for a word. This means that the
name of the word/thing itself is used and not change it to either masculine or feminine.
Ex. Book - libro
House - casa
Lamp - lampara
Generally speaking nouns that end in -o are masculine as well as those ending in -or - ema, -ista, while
those that end in -a, -ión, -ad, -ed, -ud are feminine. There are, however, some exceptions such as la mano
(hand) and you will just have to learn these as you come across them.
It is relatively simple to form the plural of most nouns: if the noun ends in a vowel, -s is added, if the noun
ends in a consonant, -es is added:
2. Word Order
Spanish seems to have a reversed word order in that an adjective goes after a noun.
Ex. Black car (English) - coche negro (Spanish)
Beautiful girl - nina bonita
3. Adjective and Noun agreement
In Spanish, adjectives agree with the gender (masculine or feminine) and the number
(plural or singular).
Ex. Black cat - la gata negra
Red cars - los carros rojos
4. Verb Changes
There are five verb changes in Spanish that is illustrated in the verb ‘ run ‘
I run. - corro
You run. - corres
He or She runs. - corre
We run. - corremos
They or you all run. - corren
On the topic of verbs in Spanish, there are two verbs meaning ‘to be’ - SER and ESTAR. It
is necessary to know the use of verb in specific situations.
SER is used for permanent state and occupations, while ESTAR is for temporary states
and geographical locations.
Ex. Soy enfermera - I am a nurse (permanent as an occupation)
Estoy feliz - I am happy (not permanent)
5. Personal Pronouns
As you noticed from the above explanation, you don’t need to say ‘You run’ - tu corres
could be corres without including the subject ‘tu’. However, there is a need to know the different
pronouns and how they are used in sentences and conversation.
1st persona - Yo (I)…….’Nosotros/ Nosotras’
2nd persona - Tu/vos usted (You-singular)
- Vosotros/ vosotras ustedes (You-plural)
3rd person - He, she, it ……. El, ella, ello
- They ……Ellos, Ellas
6. Singular and Plural
Like English, Spanish has plurals and singulars in words. Normally, you just need to add
‘s’ or ‘es’. However, if the singular ends in ‘z’ the plural will be different.
Ex. English Singular Spanish Singular Spanish
Plural
The Use of Who, What, When, Where, Which, Why, Whose and How
Remember:
Question words are words like when, what, who, which, where and how that are used to ask for
information.
In Spanish, all question words have an accent on them.
Who? – ¿Quién?
When asking about one person, you say ¿Quién? But when asking about more than one person, you
have to change it to its plural form, which is ¿Quiénes? If you need to say “whose”, you would use de
quién.
In Spanish, “what” has two different words: qué and cuál. This can get a little confusing, but an easy
way to remember it is that qué has only one factual answer possible. You use cuál to ask about a
personal opinion or a choice between options. Cuál is a bit closer to “which” in some cases. Here are
some examples:
When? – ¿Cuándo?
To ask “when” is easy: you say cuándo. The only thing to note here is you can’t use cuándo when
you’re asking for a specific time (in hours and/or minutes). For that, the question is a qué hora as in ¿A
qué hora es la película?: “What time is the movie?”
Where? – ¿Dónde?
Dónde means “where”, but it has two other forms based on the preposition you use with it. A
dónde means “to where”, while de dónde means “from where”.
Ah, the difficult por vs. para situation. It can be a bit difficult to know when to use which. It helps to
think of para qué as “what for” or to understand the purpose of something. And think of por qué as
“why”, or to understand the cause of something.
¿Por qué dices eso? – “Why do you say that?” (What caused you to say that?)
¿Para qué estás aprendiendo español? – “What are you learning Spanish for?” (For what reason
or purpose?)
How? – ¿Cómo?
Cómo is fairly straightforward, asking “how”. How someone is, how they do something, etc. But it
doesn’t apply to “how much” or “how many” (I’ll come to that next).
Cuánto and cuántos are the masculine singular and plural forms, and they mean “how much” or
“how many”. Cuánta and cuántas are the feminine singular and plural forms. They change based on the
gender of the noun you’re counting.
As you can see above, in Spanish, there are two question marks: ¿ and ?
At the start of your question, you use the inverted question mark or upside-down question mark.
This is called signo de apertura de interrogación (“question mark opening sign”) in Spanish and it’s used
to “open the question”. It just lets the reader know you’re going to ask something. You then “close the
question” with the standard question mark.
That part is easy, but there's one more thing to note. You only wrap the question marks around the
question itself. So any connecting words, greetings, or other words that come before? Leave them
outside the question marks.
So, for example, this looks like Bueno, ¿qué hay de la cena? (“Well, what’s for dinner?”) You do the
same thing with exclamation marks as well.