Languages are like a phone’s operating system. Different operating systems will do practically the same things, but they’re built or organised in a different way, like Apple and Android. So you’re used to one “operating system”, English, and now you’re about to learn a new one, Spanish. Let’s see what the differences are so it makes more sense.
1. Gender
If we think about it, in English, only nouns that refer to living beings have gender, like woman, girl, prince, princess, waiter or waitress. In Spanish, there’s a lot more gender.
Before we fully go into this, do you remember what a noun is? They’re words that refer to things or beings (dog, woman, table, bag, even abstract things like friendship or boredom). Now, and adjective is a word that says something about that noun (a large dog, a strong woman, a brown table, a long friendship). Finally, we use articles to specify nouns (the dog, a dog, the dogs, some dogs). Notice how both adjectives and articles say something about the noun, they depend on the noun.
Now that we know this, let’s look at gender in Spanish.
A. NOUNS: We do have gender in nouns for living beings just like in English (mujer: woman, camarera: waitress, camarero: waiter), but it’s not just for living beings. A table (la mesa) has a grammatical gender, for instance: it’s feminine, not masculine. Table is feminine, but «dish» is masculine: el plato. You’ll be able to tell if a noun is feminine or masculine generally because of its ending: if it ends with an «o», it’s masculine, and if it ends with an «a», it’s feminine. There are many exceptions to this, but we’ll discuss this in another article. You can also tell if a noun is feminine or masculine by its article: LA / LAS (the), UNA / UNAS (a-some) will precede feminine nouns, whereas EL / LOS (the), UN / UNOS (a-some) will precede masculine nouns.
El amigo (The friend) – Masculine, singular
Un amigo (A friend) – Masculine, singular
Los amigos (The friends) – Masculine, plural
Unos amigos (Some friends) – Masculine, plural
Now, think of the articles you would use for «amiga«. Do the following exercise:
B. ADJECTIVES: Let’s think of the English adjective «tall» (in Spanish, «alto/a«). If we want to say that a man is tall, we would say «He is tall». If we wanted to say the same for a woman, the adjective would stay the same «She is tall». This isn’t the case in Spanish, as adjectives take the gender of the noun. Generally, as well as nouns, adjectives ended in «o» will be masculine and adjectives ended in «a» are feminine. As well as for nouns, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, which we’ll study in another article.
Ella es alta – She is tall
Él es alto – He is tall
2. Verbs (actions)
Let’s look at English verbs, first. In English, subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) are more important than verbs (actions), because verbs don’t change much:
I live in Madrid
You live in Madrid
He-she-it lives in Madrid
We live in Madrid
They live in Madrid
This is not the case in Spanish, where verbs change (or are conjugated) a lot. They have different endings for each person (I, you, he, she, we, they, or, in Spanish: yo, tú, él-ella, nosotros, ellos):
VIVIR – To live
Yo viv-o en Madrid – I live in Madrid
Tú viv-es en Madrid – You live in Madrid
Él-ella viv-e en Madrid – He/she lives in Madrid
Nosotros viv-imos en Madrid – We live in Madrid
Ellos viv-en en Madrid – They live in Madrid
This causes us Spanish speakers to drop pronouns (yo, tú, él…) very often, as if you use «viv-e», you know it refers to he or she, and if you use «vivo», you know it refers to I, so verbs have more information than pronouns.
Tips for Beginners:
- Patience. Learning a language can be really fun and interesting, but it also takes time.
- Leverage mistakes. The same as when a kid is learning to speak, learning a language as an adult involves making mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with it, you can always use those opportunities to learn, but if you never try, you’ll never develop your language skills.
- Do small revisions over a longer period of time. If you want to learn the rules for Spanish gender, devote 20-30 minutes, 3 times a week to learn them, little by little, until you feel confident enough. This is just an example, you can do 15 minutes, 4 times a week, or the amount of time that suits your calendar.