ESL Tip Sheet 8: Spanish

Spoken in Spain, Central America (Costa Rica, E1 Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama), South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela), Mexico, the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba), and many parts of the United States.

The written language

Close correspondence between pronunciation and spelling, unlike English. 62.
Quotation marks are not used. 51.

Sentence structure and word order

Freer word order than in English: *Last night arrived early her father. 32a.
Indirect object occurs with a preposition: *He gave to me some flowers. 46b.
Uses that clauses and subjunctive after certain verbs: *I want that they leave now. 45b.

Nouns and pronouns

Nouns have gender. This may cause problems with pronoun reference: *They saw a sign and peered at her closely. 41 e.
Pronouns do not differentiate subject and object forms: *I told they. 41e.
No distinction of human and nonhuman relative pronouns: *The student which sat next to me... 42a.
Pronoun subject often omitted: *... because was raining. *Caused a lot of trouble. 35d; 37i.
Some uncountable nouns in English are countable and plural in Spanish: *furnitures, luggages. 44a.

Verbs and verbals

No auxiliaries in questions: *What they found? Or overcompensation: *Who did find it? 32a.
No modal verbs: *Does he should go? *I will can help you. 38d; 45a.
Endings corresponding to -ing and -ed do not have active and passive meaning: *She is interesting in stamps. 45e.
No -ing nouns (gerunds): *I enjoy to play tennis. 45c; 47d.

Adjectives and adverbs

Equivalent of not is no: *They no argue. 48a.
Double negative is routinely used: * He doesn't know nothing. 43g.
Adjectives show number: *helpfuls friends. 43a.
All comparatives and superlatives are formed with the equivalents of more and most:* the most rich man. 43h.

Articles

The books are more expensive than the disks. 44.