Describing personality in Spanish 2

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 we ask:

¿Cuál es su carácter / personalidad?

To answer this question we use the verb “ser” (to be) or “parecer” (to seem).

• El profesor de matemáticas parece muy simpático.
  – Maths teacher seems very agreeable.

• La novia de Esteban es encantadora.
  – Esteban’s girlfriend is charming.

Gender of the adjectives

Remember that almost all adjectives in Spanish have a masculine and a feminine form which agrees with the subject of the sentence, so you need to be aware of  that and put the adjective into the right gender. In general, masculine adjectives end in “o” and feminine in “a”.

• Juan es encantador y Ana encantadora.
• Su padre es cariñoso pero su madre no es cariñosa.

However, not all the adjectives have a different form for masculine and feminine, some of them don’t change. These adjectives end in “e” and have the same form for the masculine and feminine.

• Ella es muy inteligente y él es muy inteligente.
• Mi profesor de inglés es paciente pero mi profesora de historia no es nada paciente.

Finally, I am going to show you some words that express the degree. For instance:

• Mi profesor es muy tranquilo.
  – My teacher is very calm.

• Mi profesor es bastante tranquilo.
  – My teacher is quite calm.

• Mi profesor es un poco tranquilo.
  – My teacher is a bit calm.

They are quite different, aren’t they?

Here you have a list of adjectives to describe someone’s personality: