Spanish/Spanish One/Lessons/Basic grammar structures

Spanish doesn't have a fixed order in the phrases. It can be either Subject, Verb, Object; Verb, subject, object... Almost any of them is correct and used.

The personal pronouns are

Yo - I Tú - You Él / Ella - He, She (there's no "it") Nosotros / Nosotras - We (men, women) Vosotros / Vosotras - You (men, women) Ellos / Ellas - They (men, women)

Nouns in Spanish can have two gendres, masculine or femenine. Depending on which gendre they belong to, and on whether they are singular or plural, all the adjectives they have next to them change. The determined article ("the) is:

el - masculine singular los - masculine plural la - feminine singular las - feminine plural

And the indefinite article (a):

un unos una (a) unas (some)

(in the same order)

Adjectives next to nouns also change. For example, the word "silla" which means "chair" is femenin. So, you can say:

La silla (the chair) Las sillas (the chairs) Una silla (a chair) Unas sillas (the most exact translation would be "some" chairs)

Note that there's no plural or gendre mark in English for adjectives. Also note that the plural of the word is made by adding an -s. This way of making a plural is the most common. In case the word ends in a consonant, and it would be difficult to pronounce it with an -s at the end, we add -es.

Normally, you can guess the gendre of a word by looking at the end. If it ends in -a, it will NORMALLY be feminine, and if it ends in -o, it will be NORMALLY masculine. There are loads of exceptions,and the gendres will have to be learned together with the words in most of the cases. I'll write the gendres here anyway.

I'll give an example of how adjectives change depending on the noun they go with. We'll use "silla" and "cómoda" (comfortable).

La silla cómoda (the comfortable chair) Las sillas cómodas (the comfortable chairs) Una silla cómoda (a comfortable chair) Unas sillas cómodas (some comfortable chairs)

Notice that in Spanish, the order between an adjective and its noun is Noun + adjective, it's different from English. But if there's a determiner, the order is Determiner + Noun + Adjective. This is no rule, but it's the way everyone says it. If you change the order and put everything before the noun, it will be correct too, but it sounds extremely poetic, and people don't speak that way.