¡Hola! One thing I’m keen to share with you is some specific tips for learning specific languages.

Seeing as Spanish is probably the language I know the best (after English, my native language), it seems like sharing 5 essential grammar tips for Spanish beginners is a good place to start.

Oh, and we’re not even going to touch verbs today. This post is a verb-free zone.

About Nouns

Ok, there are a few basics you’ll need to know about nouns. These things will also affect the rest of what we’re going to look at in this post.

Masculine / Feminine

Nouns in Spanish have a gender. They can be masculine or feminine. If you’ve studied something like French, German, or even Arabic, you’ll know that gender is very much a thing.

But if you’re a native English, Japanese, or Thai speaker, for example, then the whole idea of giving each noun a gender may be new to you. It’s nothing to worry about.

With Spanish, you have 2 genders: masculine and feminine.

Linguists are still scratching their heads as to exactly why some languages have gender, so the best thing to do here is to just accept it and figure out what it means for you as a learner.

The gender of a word in Spanish can sometimes be identified by its ending. For example, if a word ends in ‘-ción’, it’s feminine. There are a few different rules like this but the most common one put out there for beginners in Spanish is that masculine words end in an ‘o’ and feminine words end in an ‘a’.

This is generally a useful rule of thumb and worth remembering, however, also worth remembering is that there will always be exceptions.

For example, we’ve just talked about ‘-ción’ being an ending used for feminine nouns. Where’s the ‘a’ at the end of that?!

There’s also some odd ones such as ‘mano’, meaning hand, which is a feminine noun and ‘mapa’, meaning map, which is masculine.

Please don’t stress too much about this right now. Just be aware that oddballs are out there.

Singular / Plural

As well as being masculine or feminine, a Spanish noun will also be singular or plural. This is perhaps a little more relatable than gender depending on which languages you already know.

The words you will see in the dictionary will generally be singular. So that bit doesn’t take too much thinking.

Spanish plurals are relatively easy for an English speaker too. Just like we would say ‘the apple’ and then, ‘the apples’, and making it plural simply by adding an ‘s’, in Spanish you say ‘la manzana’ and ‘las manzanas’. Woohoo!

There are, as always, some exceptions to this rule.

In fact, exception in Spanish is one of those words.

‘Excepción’ becomes ‘excepciones’.

So not only do we add ‘es’ to some nouns, but we also drop that accent (called la tilde in Spanish!) on ‘-ción’ endings.

There are also some words where there’s some slight spelling changes too. But don’t worry!

These normally happen to keep the sound of the word when that ‘s’ is added, so when you’re speaking, you don’t need to worry about this. And when you’re writing? Spell check, mi amigo!

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About Articles

The & A

Did you notice those words ‘la’ and ‘las’ at the front of ‘manzana’ and ‘manzanas’ in the last tip? Those little words are called articles.

Articles are words such as ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’. They’re sometimes taught as a bigger group of words known as ‘determiners’. We’re not going that deep into grammar world in this post. We need full on scuba equipment for that. Let’s stay snorkelling.

In English, we use the word ‘the’ when we know what we’re talking about. I don’t just mean we’re smart cookies, I mean when we’re talking about something specific.

If I say to you, “Pass me the phone, please”, chances are there’s only one phone on the table and that’s the one I’m talking about. But if there is a collection of pens and it looks like quite the rainbow on the table, I would have to be even more specific. For example, “Pass me the blue pen next to your left arm, please”. Both of these use ‘the’, which is known as the definite article. I definitely know which pen and phone that I want.

However, if I just need a pen and I couldn’t care less about the colour, I might say, “Pass me a pen, please” and you know that you can give me any pen from the selection on the table. ‘A’ (and also ‘an’) are indefinite articles. I’m not being specific, or “definite”.

What happens in Spanish is that we have to know if a noun is masculine or feminine and singular or plural. This will change the word we use for ‘the’ and ‘a’.

How many are there? As you can probably guess, there are 4 different words for ‘the’ and four different words for ‘a’ depending on the gender and how many there are. Here are those words…

Ready for an exception?

A really common exception to this rule is the word for water in Spanish, which you might already know…

el agua

‘Agua’ is a feminine noun but that stressed ‘a’ sound at the start of the word means that instead of ‘la’ or ‘una’, we use ‘el’ or ‘un’ as the article before ‘agua’.

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About Adjectives

Where do they go?

Adjectives are used to describe things. This means that you’ll want to start using them to make your Spanish a bit more jazzy rather than just “I like cheese” or “The dog”.

Do you like all cheese? Really? Personally, I hate the stinky stuff. Any cheese with a vein in it is going too far for me. And I might just describe them as disgusting.

So when I say “I like cheese” (or ‘Me gusta el queso’ in Spanish) I may want to be more specific to avoid one of those blue veiny cheeses from landing on my plate. I can use adjectives to do this relatively simply.

Of course, I could say “I like cheese except those weird veiny blue cheeses that smell like a wheely bin on a hot summer’s day” but this is beginners’ Spanish here! Let’s keep things simple.

Instead, I’m just going to say “I like delicious cheese”. Slightly subjective, yes, but we’re just trying to prove a grammar point here.

I like delicious cheese in Spanish becomes ‘Me gusta el queso delicioso’.

Right then. A few things to notice here.

Firstly, we’ve got ‘el’ in front of ‘queso’, which as we know from earlier in this post is the ‘the’ we use for masculine singular nouns.

Also, the word ‘delicioso’, our adjective here, comes after the noun.

Again, maybe not a surprise if you’ve studied French, Italian, or Portuguese. But kind of odd at first if you’re coming to Spanish with an English brain where adjectives normally come before the noun.

Most adjectives in Spanish work this way and come after the noun. They just do.

However, of course, there are some exceptions. (Are you getting bored of me saying there’s exceptions yet?)

Some adjectives go before the noun and some change their meaning if they’re in front or behind the noun. Say what?! Nothing to worry about here right now. We’ll discuss adjectives in more detail in another post soon.

Changed by gender or number of nouns

The other thing you might notice with our example ‘el queso delicioso’ is that ‘delicioso’ ends in an ‘o’, just like ‘queso’.

If I were telling you that I like the delicious apple, then look what happens…

la manzana deliciosa

But it’s kind of weird to tell you about just one delicious apple, right? Look at this:

las manzanas deliciosas

Can you guess already what’s going to happen if we talk about delicious cheeses (as in different types of cheese)?

los quesos deliciosos

So adjectives in Spanish agree with our nouns. This is one reason why, I think, Spanish flows so well and sounds so quick to new speakers.

But, of course, exceptions!

Let’s bring back ‘el agua’.

How does ‘agua’ being a feminine noun but ‘el’ being used as the article affect any adjectives that describe ‘el agua’?

‘Cold’ is ‘frío’. If we want to say ‘cold water’, what do you think is going to happen here?

el agua fría

Yup. That adjective is still going to work with the gender of the noun.

Let’s take another example here: la mano.

What do you think? Masculine or feminine noun?

‘La mano’ is feminine. This means that those adjectives are still going to agree with the gender of the word, regardless of how it looks.

For example, ‘crazy hand’ in Spanish is ‘la mano loca’. Here’s a children’s toy to prove it.

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