Guide To The Spanish Language
An introduction to Spanish without the grammar - A new and fresh perspective with some interesting items on
language and the similarities between Spanish and English
A verb is generally understood to be a word that
describes an action or state with reference to time. The problem is the word used to describe any particular action will change according to the time
reference, the state, the gender, how many people or things involved and the context. So for one action we can have many different words that describe the
same action. Each of these different versions of the same verb will indicate more than just the action. We have this in English with past tense and future
tense etc. In Spanish it is more complicated and trying to learn all the different
versions of all the different verbs is a huge task and one that most Spanish people are unable to do.
Spanish speakers will often use the wrong version of the verb but so long as they are understood they are not too bothered.
Through usage you will learn some of the different versions but you will never learn all of them because
there are just too many.
As an example let’s consider the word for “to send” in Spanish this is “enviar”.
Now the time or tense in which we want to use this word will require the word to change. Also if we are using it to describe singular or plural will require it to
change, in fact there are seven simple tense versions and seven compound versions of most verbs and each one of these will also have 1st person, 2nd
person and 3rd person both singular and plural. The end result is that there are 96 different versions of the verb “to send”. It is not practical to sit down
and learn all these versions but we do have to learn the most common verbs and the most common variations of the most common verbs as part of our
vocabulary.
Constructing the different versions of the verb is known as “conjugating the verb”.
There are two main groups of words in English the “Nouns” and the “Verbs”.
To identify which is which we need to think only of which words work with the prefix “the” to tell us it’s a noun and those that work with the prefix “to” tell us
it’s a verb.
In Spanish any word that works with the prefix “El” or “La” is a noun. The
verbs are more difficult because in Spanish they do not have a prefix but many do have a common ending, most of them end in the letter “R”.
There are four main groups of Spanish verbs those ending in “AR” those ending in “ER” those ending in “IR” and those that do not conform to any
regular pattern, known as irregular verbs.
Other words
In addition to verbs and nouns we of course have other kinds of words such as pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and determiners. It is worth
understanding that these “terms” are grammatical terms and that it is not possible to make a direct comparison to English because the rules of Spanish
grammar are different to the rules of English grammar.
The way words and gender are used in Spanish and the way words are put together to make a sentence in Spanish is different, this is something we just
have to accept.
As mentioned previously we know we have to have a vocabulary of Spanish words and we also need to know some basic Spanish phrases. Then we can
start to speak Spanish. We can learn “parrot fashion” the basic words and phrases and then start using them and through usage, just like a child learns
their native language, we can improve.
