Probably the majority of you, blog readers and language learners, already know, heard of, or even used one or both of the language learning platforms: Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. The motivation of this post is personal experience and a recurrent flow of students coming to my arms, back to “traditional” […]
In today’s post, you will learn how to translate the verb “to advise” in Spanish. This is a false friend in Spanish because the meaning of “to advise” has nothing to do with “avisar”. To advise: ‘aconsejar, asesorar’ Avisar: ‘to notify, to warn, to call’ Not the same, are they? […]
A few days ago, a follower of my Facebook page asked me for help with his personal nightmare in Spanish. For him, the irregular verbs in the Pretérito Indefinido (Past Tense) were just something he couldn’t understand, so he wrote me a few lines asking me for some tips. As […]
As you all know, all nouns in Spanish have a genre, they are masculine or feminine. The main trait to distinguish if a word is masculine or female is by the ending. If the word ends by -o is masculine and if it ends by -a is feminine, although there […]
Last week, a friend and I launched Mucha Guasa (‘Much Banter’) an educational page intending to teach Spanish in a fun way. A daily video of my friend singing or performing a line from a song or a movie translated into Spanish, which you, my dear Spanish lovers / learners can […]
In this short post you will learn how to translate the verb “to realize” in Spanish. This is a false friend in Spanish, because we have the verb “realizar” but it’s nothing alike “to realize”. To realize ➠ ‘darse cuenta’ Realizar ➠ ‘to make, accomplish’ See? Not the same. Now, look […]
Suggest plans How useful is it to find the ways to propose, accept and refuse plans? In this post you will learn how to do exactly that. There are several ways of suggesting plans. Here I’ll show you few: – ¿Porqué no vamos a la playa mañana? – Why don’t […]
Just as the English language has its phrasal verbs that cause so many headaches to the poor learners of English, Spanish has a quite nice list of phrasal verbs too. Phrasal verbs in Spanish = Perífrasis But first, what is a phrasal verb? It’s a combination of two verbs, one […]
“Ser” and “estar” are not the same thing, as the Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz tells us is his song “No es lo mismo” (here you can have a look at the lyrics in Spanish and its translation into English) In a previous post, I wrote about the differences between […]
First of all, what is DELE? DELE means Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera (Diploma in Spanish as a Foreign Language). These diplomas offer the only internationally accredited official titles which confirm a command of the Spanish Language and are awarded by the Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture and Sport. The exams to […]
In this post we will see very useful vocabulary about Internet, social networks, computers… Ordendores (‘computers’) – Portátil (‘laptop’) – Ordenador de mesa (‘desktop computer’) Activities Clicar, hacer clic, cliquear, pinchar (‘to click’). We have different options, all valid, for this verb. […]
Today I’m determined to solve one of my students’ worst nightmare. (cheers and applauses…) When do we use “quedar” and when “quedarse”? What does it mean “quedar”? and “quedarse”? These two verbs have completely different meanings and uses, let’s take a look at them: Quedar Quedar has a few meanings: […]
The 14th of February is Valentine’s Day so in today’s post I will show you some useful vocabulary and expressions related with this “loving” subject. We call this day El Día de los Enamorados or San Valentín in Spanish. What do we do in this day when we are love someone […]
We will learn some vocabulary related to describing someone’s personality in Spanish. When we want to ask about the physical aspect and the personality of someone we don’t know, we ask a general question: ¿Cómo es? (How is he / she?) But if we are just curious about the personality […]
The Imperfect – Pretérito Imperfecto – is used to talk about the past in Spanish. In the majority of situations, when we use the imperfecto is not to give the main information but to give the context that surrounds the main information. El pasado fin de semana estuve tomando el […]
Ho, ho, ho The Christmas season has come. And since learning a language is much more than learning some vocabulary and structures, I am determined (and delighted) to showing you some of the cultural aspects of this Christmas season in Spain, which will be very helpful to understand the Spanish […]
¿Qué haces todos los días? ☞ What do you do every day? All of us we have some routine daily activities that we do every day. If you’d ask me the question ¿Qué haces todas las mañanas? My answer would be in the following lines: Me levanto a las 9 de la […]
As a petition from one of the followers of my Facebook page Online Spanish Tutor (Check it out to learn daily idioms and expressions and post questions or suggest topics you want to learn about in this blog) I am going to dispel all doubts about the use of […]
Talking about the weather is a very handy topic in every language when you don’t know what to say. Here, I am going to give you all the vocabulary necessary to solve any uncomfortable silence in the lift. But before we get into that, let me tell you that “weather” […]
This verb, valer, has different meanings in Spanish. 1. It’s used to ask for the price. It’s is accorded with the item whose price we want to know. Valer = ‘To cost’ – ¿Cuánto vale este bolso? How much is this bag? – ¿Cuánto valen estos zapatos? How much are […]
As we saw in a previous post, there exist few confusing verbs in Spanish. In this post I will take the doubts out of “pedir” and “preguntar”. Both verbs express the idea “to ask” reason why they are often mixed up by the Spanish learners. The choice of one […]
As I explained in a previous post, when we want to talk about the future in Spanish we can use the future simple (or “futuro imperfecto de indicativo“) but this is not the only way we can resort to in order to talk about something that will happen in the […]
All Spanish courses focus since early stages in the learning of language in how to distinguish the scary verb pair “ser” and “estar” translated in english by just one verb, “to be”, however some of other confusing pairs are often overlooked only because they are used less often. That’s the […]
This is a common question between the Spanish students and a great source of confusion so in this article you will learn to differentiate the two pair of terms and use them correctly. The simple answer is that one is an adjective and the other is an adverb, but that […]
Introduction In this post I will explain you the relative sentences in Spanish, which are the combination of two sentences that share a common noun, that means that one of the sentences gives more information, modifies or specifies the noun in common. Look at these examples: – ¿Has visto a […]
One of the most difficult things of learning Spanish is that there are two verbs that are the equivalent of the verb “to be”, these two verbs are “ser” and “estar“. The uses of these two verbs is quite a complex thing that could be the subject of a whole […]
The target of this package is to prepare students for the DELE test, by providing both academic preparation on all 4 sections of the test, as well as test-taking skills (answering questions in the reading section without reading entire passage, elimination of multiple-choice possibilities, etc.). First of all, what is […]
In Spanish we have the construction “soler + infinitive” to express the idea that something usually occurs, that someone does something as a customary practice or regularly in present time, or that someone used to do something in the past but not anymore. This construction is equivalent to saying “used […]
CONDITIONAL The conditional tense is frequently used to express the probability, possibility, wonder or conjecture and is usually translated as would, could, must have or probably. FORM 1. The stem is the same as for the future tense, that is, the infinitive form of the verb. 2. The endings are: […]
How do we express that something is true, sure, obvious, certain in Spanish? There are a lot of expressions, amongst the more common we find: Está (más que) claro (que / cuál / dónde / cuándo) Está claro cuándo va a volver Julia de su viaje. It’s clear when Julia […]
In Spanish, when we want to talk about the future we use the “futuro imperfecto de indicativo” or Futuro Simple. FORM The future is form adding the endings (-é, -ás, -á, -emos, -éis, -án) to the infinitive form of the verb. Same endings for the 3 conjugations. Like in the […]
There are 2 ways to give instructions in Spanish: Imperative afirmative Impersonal “se” <h2>Imperative Affirmative in Spanish</h2> The imperative is used to give orders, instructions, requests… The imperative has only 4 forms: <em>tú, usted, vosotros, ustedes</em>. Regular Remember that when the imperative is accompanied with pronouns, the pronouns are attached to […]
We use the reported speech when we want to say what other people say, think or believe. There are two ways of report this information: Direct speech: when we transmit the original message word for word. We introduce the information with an introductory verb followed by inverted commas. Example: The […]
This two prepositions “por” and “para” are frequently mixed up because they are often used for the English word “for”. They key to understand which preposition has to be used is to think about the meaning you want to convey. In this post I’m going to show you the major […]
To talk about past experiences in an undefined time in the past, whether we don’t know exactly “when”, or just because it’s not important, we use the “Pretérito Perfecto de Indicativo” (Present Perfect). The pretérito Perfecto in Spanish is the tense used to talk about the recent past. However, it […]
All nouns have gender (masculine or feminine) in Spanish. Now, how can you recognise if a noun is masculine or feminine in Spanish? Watch the video below for a short and sweet explanation. Masculine or Feminine in Spanish? Let’s go into more detail. In the following part we will talk […]
We have two ways to express necessity and obligation in Spanish: tener que + infinitive hay que + infinitive. We have two ways to express necessity and obligation in Spanish: tener que + infinitive and hay que + infinitive. Look this examples: – Homer Simpson tiene que ponerse a dieta. […]
I offer comprehensive Spanish language courses aimed at developing the students’ ability to understand, speak, read and write in Spanish. I use the communicative method (focuses on a language as a medium of communication; recognizing that all communication has a social purpose – learner has something to say or find out) and the task-based language learning (focuses on […]
What would you think if you see me doing the gesture of pointing my finger to the temple and moving it in circles? For me, it’s clear that I want to express someone is crazy, but if I were in the north of Europe I could be in trouble […]
I am a native Spanish speaker and I teach it as a foreign language. If I someone asked me, why learn Spanish or another language, I would have lots of reasons to cheer people up to learn a foreign language, whatever it is. But if I had to suggest a […]
This post has been inspired by the book I have just finished reading: In the name of identity: violence and the need to belong, by Amin Maalouf. Read that I strongly recommend for several reasons: it is a thought provoking book about what makes up an individual: he says […]
Few days ago I came across this video while my research for inspiration for a post for my blog. I really loved it, it’s so clear that you don’t even need to read the text in the video or my post, even, because a picture is worth a thousand words, […]
I originally wrote this article on 17th September 2011. Back then, I believed that the main purpose of language was communication. Now, ten years later, after ten years of teaching and exploring languages, my vision has changed a lot. In fact, I disagree with what I wrote back then. So, […]
To err is human We all make mistakes, that’s an inevitable fact. And despite what many would think, making them is not that bad, because it’s mostly from the error, that, both, the students and the teachers learn. It’s mainly from the acknowledge of the error that […]
– [the Red Queen] “But you make no remark?” – “I didn’t know I had to make one-just then” – Alice faltred out. – “You should have said,” – the Queen went on in a tone of grave reproof, – “It’s extremely kind of you to tell me all this”– […]
Why spend time and effort in learning a foreign language when I can travel and communicate with the people without speaking their language? Well, there are so many reasons that I would need hundreds of posts, but I’m going to set out only the couple of ones that works for […]
