What you are to be, you are now becoming. – Carl Rogers We are constantly changing, evolving, becoming and yet, changing is not easy. Allowing transformation is not uncomplicated, and it is definitely not effortless. But I am not here to talk about how to become the person you are […]
How such a little word like a preposition (a, de, por…) can cause such havoc amongst Spanish learners? Well, to be fair. I struggled to remember my preposition in English and French, and I still sometimes slip up. But, don’t despair! I got the hang of them by dint of […]
Writing poetry in your target language is – can be–, a way to more than increasing vocabulary and reaching accuracy. Although these reasons are already good in themselves. Writing poetry through guided prompts can help you nail down grammar structures in manner that involves your emotions and your experiences. There […]
Why setting intentions in Spanish? Let’s start by laying out the benefits of setting intentions and how you can improve your Spanish (and your life even!) in doing so. “Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine […]
Whenever I ask my new students, subscribers, or any member of my audience, what they struggle with, the answer is always: the Subjunctive. And I get it. There are things in English whose logic took me time to get. And there are things I still don’t get like, the pronunciation […]
Journaling is one of the best ways to improve your Spanish. Why? Because you not only put into practice what you have learned but also, and most importantly because you connect emotionally with what you are writing. “A personal journal is an ideal environment in which to become. It is […]
I have two sentences for you: Me ha dicho que viene el jueves. Me ha dicho que venga el jueves. Both correct. How is that possible?!?! What is this madness!? It’s not senseless and it is consistent with the meaning of subjunctive (subjective). Keep reading. One could say that some […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ELITns6n2o There are four past tenses in Spanish; the perfecto, the indefinido, the imperfecto and the pluscuamperfecto. These four tenses dance together when we tell stories about the past or anecdotes… The four are necessary to express when the action happens, but also to set up the context of that past story. In this blogpost, I […]
How to give commands or instructions in Spanish? The most common way of doing so is with the Imperative form. Of course, you can always use the polite indirect question like: <strong>¿Puedes hacerme un café por favor?</strong> <em>(Can you make a coffee for me, please?)</em> o<strong> ¿Te importaría cerrar la […]
It is all about the intention. We know that the Indicative expresses a statement about a fact (affirm or suppose), while subjunctive expresses a virtual idea, something that we can’t or don’t want to express as a fact. So, in this realm of the not real, not tangible, not facts, we […]
<h3>Further Reading</h3> <p style="”text-align:" center;”><a href="/es/”https://mariaortegagarcia.com/spanish-blog/impersonal-constructions-with-ser-and-estar/”/">Impersonal constructions with “ser” and “estar”.</a></p><p style="”text-align:" center;”><a href="/es/”https://mariaortegagarcia.com/spanish-blog/ser-bueno-estar-bueno-not-same-thing/”/">”Ser bueno” and “estar bueno”, not the same thing?</a></p><p style="”text-align:" center;”><a href="/es/”https://mariaortegagarcia.com/spanish-blog/ser-or-estar-the-answer/”/">”Ser” or “Estar”: The Answer</a></p><p style="”text-align:" center;”><a href="/es/”https://mariaortegagarcia.com/spanish-blog/10-journaling-prompts-to-practice-ser-and-estar-in-spanish/”/">10 Journaling Prompts to practise “ser” and “estar”</a></p> <h3>Where to go next…</h3> <a href="/es/”https://mariaortegagarcia.com/masterclass/”/" data-elementor-open-lightbox="””" target="”_blank”" rel="”noopener" noreferrer”> […]
Remember, pronouns are words that refer to a noun. Relative pronouns are called “relative” because they are “related” to a noun that has previously been mentioned. One way to view relative pronouns is to recognise that they combine two sentences that share a common noun. In the following example, the […]
What can be a better way to learn Spanish than doing it while watching one of your favorite TV shows? Many of my students keep asking me suggestions about TV shows in Spanish that they could watch to improve their learning and also, and if watching a TV show really […]
This two verbs are a big cause of headaches. When to use one? When to use the other? We have already tackled this topic in two previous posts: Ser or Estar? The Answer Ser Bueno / Estar Bueno. Not the same thing In this post, we will learn about the […]
Subjunctive is one of the three moods in the Spanish conjugation of verbs, along with Indicative (used for objective facts) and Imperative (this is the one we use for the commands and orders). The moods in the conjugations refers at how the speaker feels about an action while the tense […]
Spanish has many verbs that are used for specific types of change or transformation, and if the change is sudden or involuntary. Many of those verbs mean “to become” in English but in Spanish they are not interchangeable because they have very specific meanings for particular situations. The next four verbs […]
Do you know how to use the verbs “tardar”, “llevar” and “durar” in time expressions? Their use is fairly common to express how long it takes to do something, how long something goes on for or how long something has been going on. Let’s see the best way to use […]
Gerund. And what’s that? FORM We make it by replacing the endings “-ar, -er, -ir” of the infinitive with -ando (verbs that ends in -ar) or -iendo for the verbs that end in -er, -ir Note: if the stem of the verb ends in vowel, ie. caer — ca-er, the […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgLzfN_37AkIn previous posts you have learned about how to talk about the past, and you learned how to form and use the Pretérito Perfecto (Present Perfect), the Pretérito Imperfecto (Past Continuous), the Pretérito Indefinido (Past Simple) and Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto (Past Perfect). Now you have all the tenses required to talk […]
In previous posts we have learnt about the “Pretérito Perfecto”, the “Imperfecto” and the “Indefinido”. In this post we are going to learn how to form and use the “Pluscuamperfecto”, the last of the past tenses in Spanish. In a next post we will learn how to use all the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
