COMPARING SPANISH AND ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Mary Ellen Page

2000

GRAMMAR BASICS
In English and Spanish there are eight (8) parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, conjunction, preposition, and interjection. NOUN: a person, place, or thing: car, school, Mr. Katz ---- auto, escuela, el Sr. Prez PRONOUN: a word that takes the place of a noun: I, you, he, ----- yo, t, l ADJECTIVE: a word that describes a noun or pronoun: pretty, good bonito, bueno ADVERB: a word that shows HOW something is done: usually ends in LY in English and MENTE in Spanish: quickly, slowly --- rpidamente, lentamente VERB: an action word: run, write, go, sleep correr, escribir, ir, dormir CONJUNCTION: a word that joins two clauses: in English, remember the word fanboys = for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so --- por/para, y, o, ni, pero, ya PREPOSITION: word that introduces a phrase indicating where something is or when an event takes place: under the chair, in the corner, in the morning, at nite ---- debajo de la silla, en el rincn, por la maana, por la noche INTERJECTION: an expression of surprise or emotion: Wow! Super! Oh, no! Caramba! Chihuahua! Vaya! INFINITIVE: form of the verb with TO, the form you find in the dictionary = to go, to do, to write, to run ir, hacer, escribir, correr Spanish infinitives always end in ar, er, ir (called first, second, and third conjugations). This is the simplest form of the verb.

 CONJUGATE: Take the infinitive and put a subject telling who/what performed the action, and an ending indicating whether that action took place in the past, present, or future. ENGLISH: I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are = present tense SPANISH: yo soy, t eres, l/ella es, Ud. es, nosotros somos, ellos/Uds. son ENGLISH: I walked, you walked, he/she/it walked, we walked, you walked, they walked SPANISH: yo camin, t caminaste, l/ella/Ud. camin, nosotros caminamos, ellos/ellas/Uds. caminaron = past tense ** Notice that in the past tense in English, all the verb forms are the same. In the present tense, the verb walk changes only in the he, she, it form by adding S. Because this creates a problem knowing who performs the action, it is necessary to write the subject pronouns for each form in all the tenses. In Spanish, however, each tense has its own set of endings for each subject. Therefore, it is permissible to eliminate the subject pronouns. Yo camin means I walked. Since is used only for the yo form in the past tense, there is no need to write it. Also notice that the word yo is never capitalized in Spanish unless it is the first word in the sentence. However, I as a subject person must always be written with a capital letter in English. Notice that English has only two forms of you, one singular and one plural. There is no distinction between familiar and formal like we had in the U.S. at the time of the Puritans. Then we used thee and thou for these forms. Spanish, however, has four forms and distinguishes between familiar (singular and plural) and formal (singular and plural). It is rude in Spanish to address someone of importance or an older person with the familiar t or a group as vosotros. When in doubt, use the formal forms of usted (abbreviated Ud.) and ustedes (Uds.). The vosotros form is used mostly in Spain, so even for familiar plural, use ustedes outside of Spain. In English, months, days, languages, and nationalities are always written with a capital letter. Harry is French, but his mother is Italian. His family speaks English at home. In Spanish, however, months, days, languages, and nationalities are all written with lower case letters unless they are the first word of a sentence or an important word in a title. El lunes tenemos un examen de espaol. Necesitamos estudiar mucho el domingo.