Semana 2 – Nationalities and Grammar

In PREDICATES, verbs carry lots of different elements. For example, the DIRECT OBJECT (objeto directo) answers the verb’s WHAT or WHO. As in, What do you drink? I drink milk; or Who do you love? I love my mum. Milk and mum are Direct objects here. Direct objects are usually nouns. In the examples in the box above, things the cat eats or drinks, we have (I translate) such direct objects as milk, water, pizza, mice…

Now we can add other words to describe, qualify and locate, as in the slide below “El koala gris bebe agua rápidamente de una taza” (The grey koala drinks water quickly from her bowl). What do we have here?

• ADJECTIVES (adjetivos): descriptive words, that describe nouns. Examples above (I translate): pink, white, black, beautiful, young, good, bad, small, big, intelligent, corny…
• ADVERBS (adverbios): words that tell us how an action is done. Examples above (I translate): quickly, slowly, happily, well, badly…
• PREPOSITIONS (preposiciones): little words that help us locate movement or things, such as (I translate from above): in (or on), above, under, with, from, between, for, to…

Well… we could expand our grammar notions to the infinite… but this is more than enough for our purposes. Try to have a look at the boxes below and figure out what’s going on… The sentence means, “The intelligent student learns Spanish easily at university”…

Try to remember these notions… I promise they’ll make your Spanish learning experience easier (and any other language you learn, actually).

WELL, grammar done and dusted!

But we’re not finished yet this week… let’s continue with Spanish…

Subject personal pronouns (pronombres personales de sujeto)

These are pronouns that work as a subject doing stuff. In English, we have first-person pronouns singular and plural (that is, the ones that refer to either myself or ourselves), I and WE.

We also have second-person pronouns, as we want to speak to someone else, not only to ourselves (well… most of us do). These are YOU both for singular and plural.

Finally, if you think about it, you speak either to yourself (first person), to someone else (second person), or about someone else. This is called the third person and can be singular (HE, SHE) and plural (THEY).

Luckily enough, the Spanish system is almost identical.

Here you have the whole system:

As you already know, we have an informal YOU (tú) and a formal one (usted).

Notice that we have a masculine and feminine WE (nosotros and nosotras), as well as THEY (ellos and ellas).

Also, notice we have a plural second person different from the singular (English has just YOU when you address one person or a whole bunch of people… although some people in some regions use YOUSE or Y’ALL… and they sometimes get mocked for it). In Spanish, we have TÚ and USTED for the singular second person. Then, for the plural second person, we have vosotros and vosotras (YOU plural masculine and feminine) in informal situations and ustedes in formal situations.

Note that the vosotros/as is used mainly in Spain, but we’ll teach it as kind of standard Spanish. In most Latin American countries, however, they use only USTEDES for any second-person plural interaction, be it formal or informal. In Spain, USTEDES is only the YOU plural in formal interactions.

All this stuff about subject pronouns is actually essential, as every time we build a sentence, we need to change (conjugate) the verb and other things according to the person (first, second, third) and number (singular or plural) of the subject, that is, according to whether we talk about “I”, “SHE”, “WE”, and so on…

Check this conversation out, and compare the items coloured to a similar conversation we practised in Semana 1… (the difference is that we are talking about David now, a third person singular):

TO BE conjugation (conjugación del verbo SER)

Verbs are sometimes used in the INFINITIVE form, which is a verb form that has not been conjugated yet. In English, the infinitive form of the verb is preceded by TO, as in TO BE, or TO DO, or TO DRINK, or TO DRIVE, or TO SHUT UP. In Spanish, the infinitive form of verbs always ends in -AR, -ER, or -IR (like amar, bailar, beber, comer, vivir, dormir).

When we use verbs in a sentence, that is, we make them the predicate of a subject, we need to conjugate them so we can know WHO is doing the action and WHEN it is happening (same as in English: you don’t say “I to be amazing, my friend to be amazing too”, but “I AM amazing, my friend IS amazing too”). In English, conjugations are quite simple… unfortunately not so much in Spanish… The present tense contains 6 different endings!

For starters, we begin with the conjugation of SER (kind of the Spanish TO BE), which happens to be irregular… let’s see:

¡Ser o no ser!

This is our I am, you are, he-she is, we are, you guys are, they are…

Notice that the formal you both singular (usted) and plural (ustedes) is conjugated as a third (she, they) person (kind of saying “You sir, is…”)

This sounds crazy, but it is useful in order to create the “distance” formality required. In fact, you are formally referring to a “YOU” as if you were speaking not TO them but ABOUT them… interesting (I think)…

In the next slide you have a few simple examples of SER in action:

Yes, we use the verb TO BE for nationalities which is one of the other uses for the verb SER.

And now, let’s move on to a few interesting facts about gender and number in Spanish…

Gender and number (género y número)

Every noun in Spanish has a gender (that is, masculine or feminine) and a number (that is, singular or plural)

This is absolutely essential for sentence construction: everything that goes with a noun (think gato, “cat”, then think article and adjective, el gato negro, “the black cat”) has to agree (concordar) with the noun in gender and number…

Anyhow, let’s start with gender and number. We’ll focus on gender first.

Natural gender (género “natural”)

Spanish “natural gender” refers to beings that have defined biological sex (apologies to non-binary people, languages are historical products, and Spanish grammar is still quite binary). Thus, we have masculine and feminine nouns. We don’t have neuter or neutral gender in Spanish. Every feminine noun referring to animals and people has a masculine counterpart. Check the examples with las vacas (the cows) and los toros (the bulls)

Note how the definite article THE changes for gender and number (el, la, los, las)… we’ll expand on that soon…

Natural gender is easy to understand (bull is masculine, cow is feminine), yet there are a few rules to learn. 

Note that the plural is masculine when we have a group of male and female animals or people. There are a couple of reasons for this.

• Spanish comes largely from Latin. Latin had a neutral gender, used for groups made up of masculine and feminine. Latin neutral and masculine, however, were very similar forms, unlike the feminine, which was vastly different. When they evolved into Spanish, the slight differences between the Latin neuter and masculine plural disappeared, and now our plural neuter in Spanish looks exactly the same as the masculine.
• Another reason points to the fact that languages, in general, are rather sexist, and Spanish is a good example. Perhaps that’s the main reason why a group of three guys is “los chicos”, a group of three girls is “las chicas”, but a group of three hundred girls and one guy is “el chico”…

NOW, natural gender kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

…

Hehehe (or jejeje as we write in Spanish)… get ready for the next section…

Grammatical gender (género gramatical)

It’s easy to understand why a toro is masculine, and a vaca is feminine. The problem is that in Spanish ALL NOUNS (from ice cream to submarine, from hope to stupidity) are either masculine or feminine. And that is an issue as you’ll have to learn to identify gender. Look at the words in the box below:

Don’t try to look for reasons explaining why some inanimate nouns happen to be masculine or feminine. Grammatical gender has become what it is out of a long history of grammar evolution, ideology, borrowings from other languages, academic and literary works… and use by many peoples from many places throughout history. The fact is that grammatical gender, that is, gender for things that don’t have biological sex, is a mess.

There are, however, some rules that can help you identify the gender of many inanimate words. The rules are not bulletproof, and there are exceptions, but they do help:

These rules can help with lots of words (most Spanish nouns, actually), but again, they are not bulletproof, and there are exceptions and uncertain categories, like the nouns ending in -e.

A good dictionary will always tell you if a noun is masculine or feminine (masc. or fem.). You may want to learn your nouns in Spanish accompanied by the definite THE article. That way, instead of just learning clase, try to learn la clase as a kind of unit, that way, you’ll remember it is feminine.

Finally, a curious fact (well, curious for me at least) … There are a handful of inanimate nouns in Spanish (literally a handful) that can be used either as masculine or feminine… your choice. They are called nombres ambiguos. One of them is el mar or la mar (the sea). Other examples are el/la azúcar (sugar) and el/la vodka (yes, vodka). And now, after reading this curious fact, you know something most native Spanish speakers don’t know about their own language!!!

Number: Singular and Plural (número: singular y plural)

Well… number is way easier to make sense of. You have either 1 (singular) or more (plural).

And now we move on to the DEFINITE and DEFINITE articles before finishing this Semana…

Definite and indefinite articles (artículos definido e indefinido)

Bear with me! This is the last section of the Semana.

BTW, talking about learning languages… every time since I learnt the expression “Bear with me”, I have a giggle when I use it. I always imagine a massive polar bear having a drink with me while we stare, hand in hand, into the Arctic sunset…

ANYHOW…

There are also definite and indefinite articles in English: the Definite article (THE) is used to talk about a noun we know out of context, as in “The dog is here”. The Indefinite article (A) is used with nouns that are unknown or random or surprising, as in “A dog is here”.

Our articles in Spanish agree with their nouns (concuerdan)… that is, they change following the noun they accompany in terms of gender and number:

“The male cat”, therefore, becomes El gato, while “the female cats” is Las gatas.

“A female cat” is Una gata whereas “a bunch of male cats” is Unos gatos…

¡OJO! Careful! When we have “A” followed by the article form “EL”, it becomes “AL”. Similarly, when we have “DE” followed by “EL”, it becomes “DEL”. Luckily, these are the only two contractions in Spanish:

Sentences to your right mean:

• I love the cat
• The cat’s milk, literally, “The milk of the cat”

You may think the reason why we contract these two prepositions ending in “E” with the article “EL” is straightforward …well it is not just to avoid writing “E” twice or using fewer words. It is also to avoid sounding “E” twice as it may sound funny or can be unpleasant trying to say both words separately. When we avoid a funny or unpleasant sound, we try to prevent a CACOFONÍA.

Gracias amigas y amigos… We know this Semana has been a bit heavy in terms of content… It will get better, I promise. We’re just trying to equip you with the basics so we can start interacting as much as possible as soon as possible…

Have you found any difficulties?…

BEAR WITH ME!

…(jejeje)

¡Nos vemos!