Semana 3 – Verbs

Conjugación: verbo hablar en presente

Let’s see more useful time expressions (expresiones de tiempo):

Asking the time… what time is it? (¿qué hora es?)

Let’s have a look at the example below. Then we’ll explain a few things afterwards.

OK!

So… to the basic question ¿qué hora es? (what time is it?) we have two possible answers:

The reason for these two possibilities is simple: UNA uses ES (it is) as it’s singular. For any other numbers, use SON (they are) as it’s plural.

THEN, to tell other times, we divide the clock into two sides:

DONE! 

Now… Typically I perfectly understand why you make mistakes when you make mistakes. I acknowledge some parts of Spanish are more difficult than others. But this next box, really, always gets me confused… WHY is this next box such a source of trouble for so many students… WHY?!?!?! I really have no clue… OK, let’s see:

At what time… (¿A qué hora…?)

When we ask ¿A qué hora…? we are not asking the actual current time anymore, but at what time you or someone else do something. Now, a VERY common mistake is the following.

Someone is asking you, at what time do you play the guitar on Wednesdays? And then you answer, it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon. WHAT?! They’re not asking you the time now, but when you do some stuff.

How do you talk about the time you do stuff? Well, insert an A and drop the ES or SON:

Finally, instead of A las dos de la tarde, (at two in the afternoon) you can use the expressions SOBRE (around) or DE … A… (from … to…), as in the examples above “I dance around 10 at night” or “I dance from 10 to 12 at night”

Now, before we continue… please have a break.

You deserve it!

Adjectives: agreements (Adjetivos: concordancias)

In your Spanish journey, you’re going to learn adjectives (lots of them). They’re great useful words to describe people, things, feelings, situations and cute, sweet, fluffy, delightful, furry, purry and little creatures (the ones in italics are a bunch of English adjectives, by the way).

Adjectives usually describe nouns as in red panda, or big car, or idiotic politician.

There are two main general rules when dealing with adjectives in Spanish:

Adjectives usually go after the noun they describe (not before as in English): panda rojo, coche grande, político idiota.

Adjectives must agree with the noun they describe in gender and number. That is, if the noun is feminine singular, for example, the adjective must adopt a feminine singular form.

There are a few rules about changing adjectives in terms of gender and number to make them agree with the noun they describe.

Adjective’s agreement (you can check the examples in the box above)

Adjectives ending in -o have an -a feminine counterpart: el chico bueno – la chica buena

Adjectives ending in -e, –consonant, –ista don’t change for masculine or feminine: el chico inteligente, feliz y optimista – la chica inteligente, feliz y optimista

Exceptions: adjectives ending in –or, –ol, –ón, –án, –ín and –és add an -a for the feminine (see examples above, at the end)

Plural is created by adding -s to vowel and -es to consonant: la chica mala, las chicas malas; el chico español, los chicos españoles

Exception: adjectives ending in -z replace in the plural the -z with –ces: la chica feliz, las chicas felices

When we have masculine and feminine nouns, the plural adjective is in the plural masculine form: las chicas y los chicos son buenos

As you can see, the implications of the gender and number of the noun are HUGE, as they influence articles, adjectives, and all kinds of things around the noun… Keep this in mind when you use your nouns!

Now we are going to give you a list of adjectives so you can start describing stuff until the cows come home… (BTW your English expressions are just hilarious… until the cows come home… hilarious!!!)

If you have a look at the end of the table, we have cognados (cognates) are the good guys of the adjective word… Cognates refer to 2 words in different languages that derive from the same origin (Latin, Greek…); therefore, they’re similar and easy to translate (and remember!). Like the adjectives extravagante or elegante or brillante… and their obvious English counterparts extravagant, elegant or brilliant.

Some cognados, on the other hand, are what we call “false friends”. These naughty words seem designed to make us language learners sound not the brightest.

There are plenty of “false friends” examples, but I’ll just give you two now: the Spanish constipado and embarazada.

Constipado actually means to be a bit sick with a cold… so you can imagine how many Spanish speakers learning English would happily say, “I’m so constipated I can hardly breathe” when they have a nasty cold…

The embarrassment works both ways. Imagine how many English-speaking females learning Spanish would say “Estoy muy embarazada” to their Spanish-speaking in-laws, trying to express they are very embarrassed… without realising that embarazada actually means “pregnant” in Spanish (…and Spanish mother-in-law faints…)

Both are real stories that have happened to me… So, beware of “false friends”!

…

As we mentioned before, adjectives in Spanish usually come before the noun. This is mainly true, but I’ll clarify a couple of things about the order of adjectives:

As a rule of thumb, you’re safe placing adjectives after the noun, as in the examples above. Occasionally, though, we can place them before the noun for expressive reasons. You find this mostly in literature (poetry and things like that). We’ll learn more about this in the future.

Some very common adjectives, however, can be placed before the noun at will. A couple of them behave oddly when we do that:

Some adjectives change their form slightly if they go before the noun:

Bueno: before the noun loses the “-o” in the masculine: “un buen chico” (same meaning as “un chico bueno”)

A couple of adjectives even change form and meaning if placed before the noun. One of them is “grande”:

Grande: before the noun loses the ending “-de”: “un gran hombre”, and also changes the meaning: “un gran hombre” means a great man, whereas “un hombre grande” means a big guy.

¡OJO! It’s important to note here that the number 1 “UNO” when used as an adjective before a masculine noun loses the final “-o”. So you DON’T SAY “*uno hombre” but “un hombre”, “un gato”, “un coche”… and so on… For the feminine, just use “UNA” regardeless, “una mujer”, “una gata”…

Before we finish with our last grammar topic of the week, the possessives, have a look at a few more verbs in -AR to add to your vocab:

Expressing possession in Spanish (Expresar posesión en español)

When we use the word “possession”, we are not referring to horror movie stuff (as to being possessed by an evil spirit) but to the much more mundane and useful notion that some things belong to someone.

For starters, let’s prevent a mistake that can be quite puzzling for your Spanish speaking future audience: WE DO NOT HAVE A SAXON GENITIVE (’s) in Spanish. We don’t even use apostrophes (’)!!!

Therefore, if you want to refer to “Mary’s dogs” and you say “*Mari’s perros” people either won’t understand you at all or will think you’re talking about a bunch of dogs called “Mari”.

Instead of (’s), we use the structure DEFINITE ARTICLE + THING or PERSON (the thing or person “owned”) + DE + THING or PERSON (owner). Therefore “Mary’s dogs” would translate in Spanish as “Los perros de Mari”, literally in English “The dogs of Mary”.

Possessive adjectives (adjetivos posesivos)

Finally, let’s have a look at the possessive adjectives (equivalents to my, your, his or her, our, your, their)

As you can see above, some possessive adjectives change for gender and all change for number depending on the thing possessed. I’m going to give you a couple of examples to clarify things:

Tu casa / tus zapatos (your house / your shoes)

Nuestra casa (our home, we are 3 guys)

Nuestros coches (our cars, we are 3 girls).

Well, Semama 3 is done!

Have you actually considered how much stuff you can already say and understand?

Well done!

¡Chao!