While Learning Spanish can be easy when taught the right way, it can also get very frustrating when the basics are forgotten!

In this series we’ll be covering Spanish Grammar, starting at the very beginning. Later on I’ll teach you some more advanced techniques to speak Spanish correctly but lets get the basics out of the way first!

OK, before we begin, you should know that when writting in Spanish, an inverted question mark (¿) and an inverted exclamation mark (¡) are used at the beginning of every interrogative or exclamatory sentence.  

For example.

‘Good morning/day’ = ¡Buenos dias! (pronounced bwe-nos di-yahs)
‘Good afternoon’ = ¡Buenas tardes! (pronounced bwe-nas tar-des)
‘Good evening/night’ =  ¡Buenas noches! (pronounced  bwe-nas noh-ches)
‘What’s your name?’ = ¿Cómo te llamas? (pronounced ko-mo te lya-mas)

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  Quick tip on pronunciation:
In Spanish you do not pronounce the letter /h/, instead make it a silent letter, except when used in the /ch/ sound. So, for ¡Hola! it should be pronounced not like [hoh-lah] but [oh-lah].
*****

Right, now the second thing to remember is that Spanish nouns have genders.

Most words describing people have a natural gender: masculine like hombre (”male person”) or feminine, like mujer (”female person”).

The gender of some animals, things, and some other words used for people don’t follow any rules: they have grammatical gender.

Casa (house), rana (frog), and visita (visitor) are of the feminine gender.

Árbol (tree), sapo (toad) and genio (genius) are of the masculine gender.

Invitado, invitada (guest) and mono, mona (monkey) have natural gender.

Fortunately the gender of a noun is usually (but not always) indicated by the last letter of the word;

 -o indicates masculine nouns, and -a indicates feminine nouns.

Adjectives also have gender and number.

Like nouns, -o usually indicates the masculine form of the adjective, and -a indicates the feminine form. Adding an -s at the end of an adjective or noun makes it plural. Adjectives need to match the noun they describe in both gender and number. For example, borracho “drunk”, when modifying las mujeres (”the women”), makes las mujeres borrachas.

In general, where genders of nouns or adjectives are used, we’ll use the form “o/a” to differentiate. It should be clear from context when to use the feminine and when to use the masculine form.

We’ve obviously only touched the surface so far of learning Spanish Grammar. I’ve kept is simple at this point to cover the necessary basics, but don’t worry we’ll dive right into the hardcore stuff very shortly! 

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