1. Estar in the present tense

Here’s what the Spanish verb estar looks like in the present tense and how you translate it:

2. Examples with estar

Here are some examples with the six forms we’ve just learned, in both Spanish and English:

3. When to use the verb estar

Estar is one of two Spanish verbs that translates as ‘to be’. The other verbs is ser, which we’ll learn in a future post.

The verb estar is used to indicate:

• Where people or things are
• Moods and feelings
• Physical conditions
• Physical appearance at some point in time
• Temporary rather than permanent conditions

To illustrate these five points, here are five examples with their English translation:

4. Speaking drill

Can you say these ten sentences in Spanish? You can see the solutions in Spanish and hear them said by native speakers in the Lesson 4 – Grammar of my free Spanish course.

1. How are they?
2. They’re angry
3. Which hotel are you (vosotros) in?
4. We’re in the Arizona hotel
5. Where are you (tú)?
6. Is he at the hotel?
7. Is she on the beach?
8. You’re (tú) looking very elegant
9. I’m on vacation
10. Are they on vacation?

To get this and other grammar lessons:

ADJECTIVES

Adjectives are words used to describe or modify nouns and pronouns.

Here are some examples in English:

1. Adjectives – describing words

In these three examples the word black is a describing word which modifies the noun cat.

There is one other describing word in the examples above. Can you tell which one it is? Post your answer (or guess) in the comment box!

2. Adjectives – possession

Adjectives, however, are not just describing words, but they can also indicate possession:

In these two cases the words my and your indicate who the owner of the cat is.

3. Comparing English and Spanish

In Spanish grammar, adjectives work in a similar way. Observe these examples:

Notice that describing words in Spanish generally go after the noun they describe (gato negro) and not before it (black cat).

Here are the possessive adjective examples we saw above in Spanish:

Notice that the possessive adjective goes before the noun in both English and Spanish (my cat – mi gato).

4. More grammatical terms

This is what Lesson 1 of my free Spanish course looks like:

 

 

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If you want to hear all the examples in this lesson, you can find them in the free Lesson 2 of my Spanish for beginners course.

1. How to ask people their names, and how to answer the question

This is how you ask someone his or her name in Spanish:

and this is how you answer when people ask you your name:

2. Examples

Here are six examples where you can practice asking people their names and introducing yourself:

3. The literal meaning of ‘¿cómo te llamas?’ and ‘me llamo …’

Here’s what ¿cómo te llamas? and me llamo … mean word for word:

* The word cómo usually means how.
* Te llamas literally means you call yourself.
* When you ask ¿cómo te llamas? what you’re saying is how do you call yourself?
* Likewise, me llamo literally means I call myself.
* When you say me llamo …, what you are saying, literally, is I call myself …

4. How to pronounce ‘¿cómo te llamas?’ and ‘me llamo …’

In the free Lesson 2 of my Spanish for beginners course you can hear all the sentences in this article said by native Spanish speakers, including myself.

When you listen to them, notice how the intonation rises at the end of the question, but not at the end of the answer.

5. Exercise

In the free Lesson 2 of my Spanish for beginners course you can do the interactive multimedia drill to practice what you’ve learned here.

A quick search for terms such as “Spanish gender rules” gives you a frightening number of sites stating, for instance, that “nouns ending in ‘e’ and nouns ending in a consonant are usually masculine”. The problem with these so-called rules is that there are simply thousands of Spanish feminine nouns ending in ‘e’ or a consonant.

My dilemma as a Spanish teacher is that I want to help my students learn the language as fast as possible at the same time as I steer them away from making basic mistakes. For that reason I prefer to ignore gender rules with a substantial number of exceptions, which leaves only three to follow.

So, in my opinion, these are the only gender rules consistent enough to be considered reliable:

1. Most Spanish nouns ending in ‘o’ as masculine.
2. Most Spanish nouns ending in ‘a’ are feminine.
3. Spanish nouns ending in ‘dad’, ‘tad’, ‘tud’, ‘ción’ ‘sión’, ‘gión’, ‘triz’ and ‘umbre’ are feminine.

Rule 3 is a golden rule, but in rules 1 and 2 (the rules that apply to the great majority of Spanish nouns) the word to watch out for is ‘most’. That’s why it’s good practice to learn all new nouns with their article, rather than on their own.

In other posts we’ll see a longer list of exceptions to these two rules, but here are some. As you can see, many are everyday words:

Briefly: the gender of nouns ending in ‘o’ and ‘a’ can be guessed in the great majority of cases, but the exceptions are often commonly used nouns. Other gender rules, except for Rule 3 above and that applying to nouns of Greek origin, are not reliable enough.

About me and my Spanish course

I have taught Spanish for over fifteen years and have two Spanish learning publications to my name. My latest work is the Spanish for beginners course at Spanish Bookworld.

This course come with dozens of online lessons for both adults and children, downloadable mp3s and videocasts, interactive ebooks, language learning articles and an exclusive forum where you can ask me your language questions.