Spanish for Kids

Eight in the morning in Sevilla

It is eight in the morning in Sevilla, in the south of Spain. A boy pushes open the door of the bakery on his street. Before he asks for a bread roll, he says two words to the woman behind the counter.

Buenos días.

Say it out loud: BWEH-nohs DEE-ahs. It means good morning. In many Spanish-speaking places, walking into a small shop and saying nothing feels rude. So the greeting comes first. The bread comes second.

Key idea: In Spanish you greet first and ask second.

Hola, and the letter that stays quiet

The first word almost everybody learns is hola. It means hello. You say it OH-lah.

Look at that word again. It starts with h, but you do not hear the h at all. In Spanish the h is silent. Every single time. So hola is OH-lah, never HOH-lah.

Here are three Spanish words with a silent h. Cover the middle column and try each one first.

The part in CAPITAL LETTERS is the part you push hardest. In hola you push the OH. In hospital you push the TAHL.

Three hellos, one for each part of the day

Hola works all day. Three more hellos go with the clock. Speakers do not all switch at the same hour, so treat these times as a guide.

Notice something odd. The first is buenos días, and the other two are buenas tardes and buenas noches. That is not random. Spanish words come in two groups, and the word in front has to match. You meet those two groups properly in the colours lesson.

Buenas noches does two jobs. Arriving at a friend's house at seven in the evening, it means good evening. Going up to bed, it means good night.

Saying goodbye

Everybody knows adiós. It is not the one Spanish speakers use most, though.

Hasta luego sounds warmer when you will meet again soon. Adiós can sound like goodbye for a long time. So: hasta luego to a friend at the school gate, hasta mañana to your teacher on Tuesday.

The ñ in mañana wears a little curly line called a tilde. It turns the n into the ny sound in the middle of canyon, so mañana is mah-NYAH-nah.

Remember: hasta luego for later today, hasta mañana for tomorrow, adiós for a real goodbye.

Please, thank you, and you are welcome

Four small words will make you sound polite anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world.

De nada answers gracias, the way you are welcome answers thank you. It really means of nothing, as if to say it was no trouble.

One surprise. In most of Spain the c in gracias sounds like the th in think: GRAH-thyahs. In Latin America, and in the south of Spain, it sounds like an s: GRAH-syahs. Both are correct, so pick whichever is easier for your mouth.

Me llamo: telling somebody your name

To give your own name you say me llamo and then your name. Sofía would say: Me llamo Sofía.

You say it meh YAH-moh. The double l in llamo sounds like the y in yes, not the l in lamp.

Me llamo really means I call myself. So Me llamo Sofía is I call myself Sofía. Languages do not swap word for word.

To ask somebody else, say ¿Cómo te llamas? (KOH-moh teh YAH-mahs), which means what is your name? When you have just met somebody, say mucho gusto (MOO-choh GOOS-toh), nice to meet you.

Look at the front of ¿Cómo te llamas? The upside-down question mark warns you that a question is coming before you read it out loud. English makes you wait until the end.

¿Cómo estás? and three ways to answer

To ask a friend how they are, say ¿Cómo estás? (KOH-moh ehs-TAHS). Here are three honest answers, from good to not so good.

Then hand the question back with ¿Y tú? (ee TOO), which means and you? A conversation stays alive when both people ask something.

The whole thing, as one conversation

Every word below is one you have met in this lesson. Read it out loud twice. The second time, be the other person.

• Ana: ¡Hola! Buenos días. (Hello! Good morning.)
• Leo: Buenos días. ¿Cómo estás? (Good morning. How are you?)
• Ana: Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y tú? (Very well, thank you. And you?)
• Leo: Más o menos. ¿Cómo te llamas? (So-so. What is your name?)
• Ana: Me llamo Ana. Mucho gusto. (My name is Ana. Nice to meet you.)
• Leo: Mucho gusto. ¡Hasta luego! (Nice to meet you. See you later!)

That is a real conversation, and you can have it today with anybody in your house. The ¡ in ¡Hola! works like the upside-down question mark: something loud is coming.

A clapping chant to fix the words in your head

Clap on every beat written in capitals. Say it three times, a little faster each time.

• HO-la, HO-la, ¿co-mo esTAS?
• MUY bien, GRA-cias, ¿y TU?
• ME lla-mo, ME lla-mo, MU-cho GUS-to.
• A-diós, HAS-ta LUE-go, HAS-ta ma-ÑA-na.

For the grown-up helping

The most useful thing you can do is answer in Spanish. When the child says hola, say hola back. When they say gracias, say de nada. Ten seconds of real exchange beats another minute of reading. Do not correct the sounds much on the first day. A child corrected on every syllable goes quiet, and a quiet child is not practising. The sounds get proper work in the next two lessons.

Common misconceptions

• The h makes a small breathy sound. It makes no sound at all. Hola is OH-lah and hermano is ehr-MAH-noh.
• Buenas noches only means good night at bedtime. It is also the normal hello after dark.
• Adiós is the everyday goodbye. Hasta luego is commoner between people who will meet again soon.
• The ll in llamo sounds like the l in lamp. It sounds like the y in yes: meh YAH-moh.

What you now know

• Hola is hello; buenos días, buenas tardes and buenas noches go with the time of day.
• Adiós, hasta luego and hasta mañana are three ways to say goodbye.
• Por favor, gracias, de nada, perdón: please, thank you, you are welcome, sorry.
• Me llamo plus your name gives your name. ¿Cómo te llamas? asks for somebody else's.
• ¿Cómo estás? asks how somebody is. Muy bien, bien and más o menos are three answers.
• The h is silent, the ll sounds like y, and questions open with an upside-down mark.

Sources

1. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Funciones: relaciones sociales, saludar y despedirse. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes: Niveles de referencia para el español. cvc.cervantes.es
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). hola. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish phonology: seseo, ceceo and distinción. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española. (2014). hola; gracias; adiós. Diccionario de la lengua española (23rd ed.). Madrid: Espasa.
5. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

The word that changes its a five times

Say these English words out loud, slowly: cat, cake, car, call, about. Every one is spelled with the letter a. Every one says that a differently. One letter, five sounds, and nothing on the page tells you which is coming.

Now say these Spanish words: casa, cama, mapa, rana, plaza. Every single a in all five is the same sound. Ah. Not one of them wobbles.

The point: a Spanish vowel makes one sound, and it keeps making it.

That is why you can learn to read Spanish out loud in one lesson, even when you have no idea what the words mean. Below are three steps. By the end of the lesson you will sound out words nobody has taught you.

The five sounds, one word each

Say the Spanish word in the last column twice before you move to the next row.

English speakers slide off the end of o and e without noticing. Our no drifts towards no-oo, and our day drifts towards day-ee. Spanish holds them still. Say oh and stop dead. Say eh and stop dead. That one habit makes a beginner sound much better.

Try it on a word you already know: hola. Two vowels, o and a. OH, then AH. OH-lah.

Which part of the word do you push?

Every Spanish word of more than one part has one part you push harder, and Spanish tells you which one. There are only two rules, and one override.

The little mark in limón is an accent. Spanish only ever puts it above a vowel, and it only ever does this one job: it points at the part you push.

Three steps, worked all the way through

Here is the word chocolate, spelled the Spanish way, which happens to be the same as the English way.

Step 1. Cross out any h. There is no h here, so nothing to do.

Step 2. Break it into parts. cho / co / la / te.

Step 3. Find the push, then give every vowel its one sound. The word ends in the vowel e, so rule one applies: push the second-to-last part, which is la. The ch is one sound, the same ch as in chair.

choh-koh-LAH-teh. Say it three times. That is how a child in Bogotá asks for chocolate.

The same three steps, and one letter flips the answer

Now do hospital.

Step 1: cross out the h, so the word starts with the o. Step 2: os / pi / tal. Step 3: it ends in the letter l. Not a vowel, not n, not s. So rule two applies and you push the last part.

ohs-pee-TAHL.

Look at what just happened. Chocolate and hospital are built out of the same kinds of parts. One ends in a vowel and one ends in l, and that single letter moved the push from the middle of the word to the end of it. Nothing else changed.

One small mark, one big difference

Two Spanish words are spelled with the same four letters: papa and papá.

Papa ends in a vowel with no mark, so the push goes on the second-to-last part: PAH-pah. Papá has a mark on the last a, so the push goes there: pah-PAH. Tell somebody you love your papa and you have told them you love potatoes. The accent is not decoration.

The letter that is on the page and not in your mouth

You met the silent h in the first lesson. Here it is doing its disappearing act in five more words.

Huevo is worth a second look. Cross out the h and you are left with u and e side by side, and those two run together into a weh sound. That is why an egg is WEH-boh and not hoo-EH-voh.

A vowel chant to clap

Clap once on every capital letter. Go slowly the first time, then twice as fast.

• AH like casa, EH like mesa, EE like mi.
• OH like oso, OO like luna, that is five.
• A, E, I, O, U, cinco vocales, five vowels for you.

Cinco vocales (SEEN-koh boh-KAH-lehs) means five vowels. You now have a Spanish sentence inside an English rhyme.

For the grown-up helping

Ask the child to read the words out loud rather than silently. The whole point of the three steps is that they are performed, and a child reading in their head cannot hear whether the push landed in the right place. If a word comes out wrong, do not say the word for them. Ask which letter the word ends in, and let the rule do the correcting. That is slower today and much faster in a fortnight, because the rule is what transfers to the next word.

Common misconceptions

• Spanish i sounds like the English word eye. It sounds like ee, so mi is mee and sí is see.
• Spanish e sounds like the letter name ee. It sounds like the e in bed, so mesa is MEH-sah.
• An accent mark means hold the vowel longer. It only points at the part you push.
• You have to know what a word means before you can say it. In Spanish it is the other way round. You can say a word correctly and look it up afterwards.

The short version

• Five vowels, five sounds, and they never change: ah, eh, ee, oh, oo.
• Stop dead at the end of o and e instead of sliding off them.
• Ends in a vowel, n or s: push the second-to-last part. Ends in anything else: push the last part.
• An accent mark beats both rules and points straight at the push.
• The h is silent, and u next to another vowel often turns into a w sound, as in huevo.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish orthography: the 27-letter alphabet, the acute accent, and the silent h. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). casa. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Pronunciación y prosodia, inventario A1-A2: pureza de las vocales y mantenimiento del timbre en las vocales inacentuadas. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2010). Reglas de acentuación gráfica. Ortografía de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa.

Three mistakes in one short sentence

Here is a sentence a Spanish seven-year-old could write about her pet: Mi perro se llama Rosa.

A beginner reads it out loud like this: mee PEH-roh seh LAH-mah ROH-sah.

Every letter she said is printed on the page. She has not skipped anything or made anything up. She is still wrong three times, and one of those mistakes changed what the sentence means. This lesson takes the three mistakes apart one at a time.

Mistake one: ll is not an l

She read llama as LAH-mah, using the l of lamp. Two letter l side by side in Spanish are not two l sounds, and they are not a long l either. They are the y of yes.

Here is a thing worth knowing before somebody surprises you with it. In Argentina and Uruguay, most people say that ll like the s in the English word treasure, so calle comes out closer to KAH-zheh, and younger speakers there often make it a sh sound. They are not saying it wrong. Spanish is spoken in twenty-one countries and it does not sound the same in all of them, any more than English sounds the same in Glasgow and in Texas.

Mistake two: pero and perro are two different words

She read perro as PEH-roh. That is a real Spanish word, but it is the wrong one.

So mi pero se llama Rosa says something like my but is called Rosa. The single r is a quick flick of the tongue against the roof of your mouth, the sound in the middle of the American way of saying butter or ladder. The double r is that same flick repeated fast, over and over, so that the tip of your tongue flutters.

Worth holding on to: one r or two r is not spelling neatness. It is the difference between a dog and a word meaning but.

How to roll an r without hurting yourself

Nobody rolls an r by pushing harder. You roll it by relaxing and letting air do the work. Try this in order.

1. Say the English word ladder quickly, five times. Feel the tip of your tongue tap just behind your top teeth. That tap is the Spanish single r.
2. Now hold your tongue in that spot, loose, and blow air past it steadily, as if you were sighing.
3. If the tip flutters even once, that is a roll. Keep going for two seconds.
4. Now put it into a word: rrrrrrosa, perrrrro.

An honest word about this. Plenty of Spanish-speaking children cannot roll an r at five and can at seven. It arrives when it arrives, and no amount of trying hard on a Tuesday will fetch it sooner. Everyone will understand you meanwhile. Keep the tap, keep practising the flutter, and let it come.

Mistake three: the r that starts a word

She read Rosa as ROH-sah with an English r. When r is the first letter of a word, Spanish rolls it, even though only one r is written.

So Rosa, rojo (ROH-hoh, red) and ratón (rah-TOHN, mouse) all begin with a rolled r. The rule is short: one r between two vowels is a tap, and an r at the start of a word is a roll.

The letter Spain gave the world

The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters. Twenty-six of them are the ones in English. The extra one is ñ, called eñe (EH-nyeh), and it sounds like the ny in the middle of canyon.

It has a real history. In medieval Spanish, a great many words were written with a double n. Copying by hand was slow, so scribes began writing a single n with a wavy line above it to stand for the pair. Centuries later, in the eighteenth century, that shorthand was formally made a letter of its own. The wavy line is called a tilde.

Say año without the tilde and you have said a different word. The two dots of the tilde, so to speak, are load-bearing.

The sentence, fixed

Mi perro se llama Rosa. mee PEH-rroh seh YAH-mah RROH-sah. My dog is called Rosa.

Now say these five, each of which hides one of today's three traps.

• Mi perro es rojo. (mee PEH-rroh ehs RROH-hoh) My dog is red.
• La llave está en la calle. (lah YAH-beh ehs-TAH ehn lah KAH-yeh) The key is in the street.
• El niño tiene siete años. (ehl NEE-nyoh TYEH-neh SYEH-teh AH-nyohs) The boy is seven years old.
• Hoy hay lluvia. (oy ay YOO-byah) Today there is rain.
• Me llamo Ramón. (meh YAH-moh rrah-MOHN) My name is Ramón.

For the grown-up helping

Do not chase the rolled r. If the child cannot make it today, say so plainly and move on, because a sound a child is failing at in public quickly becomes a sound they avoid. The tap, the ll and the ñ are all reachable straight away and all three change meaning, so they are the better use of this week. Reading the five sentences above out loud together, taking turns, does more than drilling one consonant.

Common misconceptions

• The double l is just a longer l. It is a completely different sound, the y of yes: se llama is seh YAH-mah.
• The tilde on ñ is decoration. It makes a different letter. Año and ano are not the same word.
• Every Spanish r is rolled. Only the r at the start of a word and the written rr are rolled. A single r between vowels is one quick tap.
• You cannot be understood until you can roll an r. You can. Use the tap everywhere while the roll is arriving.

Putting it together

• ll sounds like the y in yes across most of the Spanish-speaking world.
• ñ is its own letter, sounds like ny in canyon, and began as a scribe writing nn in a hurry.
• One r between vowels is a tap. A written rr is a roll, and so is an r that starts a word.
• pero is but and perro is dog, so the extra r carries the whole meaning.
• The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters, and the twenty-seventh is the one with the tilde.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish orthography: the 27-letter alphabet and the digraphs ch, ll and rr. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ñ: origin in the medieval abbreviation of double n. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish phonology: the trill and tap contrast in carro and caro, and yeísmo. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). perro. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
5. Real Academia Española. (2014). perro; pero; año. Diccionario de la lengua española (23rd ed.). Madrid: Espasa.

The question you cannot answer yet

Imagine you are staying with a family in Mexico. A woman leans down, smiles, and asks you: ¿Cuántos años tienes?

You work it out. Años is years, you met it in the last lesson. So she is asking how many years you have, which is how Spanish asks how old you are. You are nine. And you are stuck, because you do not have the word nine.

Eleven words fix that, and you can learn them today.

Cero to diez

Read the column of Spanish words downwards, out loud, three times. Then cover it and count on your fingers.

The three that catch people out

Seis is one sound, not two. It rhymes with the English word says. Beginners try to make it SEH-ees, which nobody says.

Nueve has that u doing its w trick, the same as in huevo. NWEH-beh, in one movement. And the v sounds much closer to a b, which is why the guide says beh. Spanish b and v are the same sound.

Cero, cinco and diez all have the letter that changes across the Spanish-speaking world. In most of Spain you will hear THEH-roh, THEEN-koh and dyeth. In Latin America you will hear SEH-roh, SEEN-koh and dyehs. Pick one and stay with it.

In short: eleven words, and three of them need a second look before they stick.

Now answer her

The question was ¿Cuántos años tienes? (KWAHN-tohs AH-nyohs TYEH-nehs). Word for word it means how many years do you have.

So you do not say I am nine. You say you have nine years.

Tengo nueve años. TEHN-goh NWEH-beh AH-nyohs. I am nine.

Swap in your own number. Tengo siete años. Tengo diez años. Tengo ocho años. The shape never changes: tengo, then the number, then años.

Tengo means I have, and it is one of the most useful words in this whole course. You will use it again for pets, for brothers and sisters, and in the introduction you perform in the last lesson.

Counting real things: un and una

When uno stands in front of a thing, it drops its o.

Two things to notice, and neither needs a rule learned by heart. It is un perro but una casa, because Spanish words come in two groups and uno has to match the group. And when you go past one, the thing being counted picks up an s, exactly as in English. The next lesson is where the two groups get sorted out properly.

Spanish numbers hiding in your calendar

Look at the last four months of the year: September, October, November, December.

The oldest Roman calendar had ten months and began in March. Count from March and September lands eighth in our year but seventh in theirs, October ninth in ours and eighth in theirs, and December twelfth in ours and tenth in theirs. Their names are simply the Latin numbers seven, eight, nine and ten, and those Latin numbers are the grandparents of the Spanish ones.

An octopus has ocho legs. That is not a coincidence, and it is a good thing to remember on the day you forget the number eight.

Counting out loud, two ways

First, forwards, with a clap on each one: uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.

Now backwards, which is far harder and far more useful, because it proves you know the words rather than the tune: diez, nueve, ocho, siete, seis, cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno, cero. Blast off.

Then the two-step: count only the even ones, dos, cuatro, seis, ocho, diez. Then only the odd ones, uno, tres, cinco, siete, nueve.

For the grown-up helping

Numbers are the one part of a language you can practise without any extra time. Count the stairs in Spanish. Count out the forks for the table. Ask for dos slices of toast. A child who hears cuatro forty times in a week while doing something else will keep it, and none of those forty times cost either of you a minute. Backwards counting is worth pushing on, because reciting one to ten forwards can be done from memory as a single long word without knowing which is which.

Common misconceptions

• Tengo nueve años means I am nine years. It means I have nine years. Spanish holds an age rather than being one, and you have to say tengo, not soy.
• Seis has two syllables. It has one, and it rhymes with says.
• The v in nueve sounds like an English v. Spanish b and v are the same sound, so nueve is closer to NWEH-beh.
• Uno is always uno. In front of the thing you are counting it becomes un or una: un perro, una casa.

What to remember

• cero, uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.
• ¿Cuántos años tienes? asks your age, and Tengo nueve años answers it.
• Tengo means I have, and you will keep using it all course.
• Uno becomes un before one group of words and una before the other.
• September, October, November and December carry the Latin ancestors of siete, ocho, nueve and diez.

Sources

1. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). Appendix: Spanish numerals. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). uno. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman calendar: the ten-month year beginning in March, and the numbered month names through December. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Nociones generales, inventario A1-A2: cantidad numérica, números cardinales. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
5. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

El sol and la luna

Two things in the sky. In English you put the same word in front of both: the sun, the moon. In Spanish you cannot.

El sol (ehl sohl), the sun. La luna (lah LOO-nah), the moon.

Spanish has two words for the, and every single naming word in the language belongs to one side or the other. Nothing about a moon is more la than a sun. This is not about what things are like. It is about which group a word sits in, the way English decides that a ship is a she and a table is not.

This lesson is built on one table. Everything else hangs off it.

Ten colours

Two sounds to watch. The j in naranja is not the j of jam. It is a scrape at the back of the throat, close to the h in house but rougher, and it is the same sound as the j in rojo. And rojo and rosa both begin with a rolled r, because an r at the start of a word always rolls.

Naranja is also the word for an orange, the fruit. English did the same trick: the fruit came first and the colour was named after it.

The colour has to match the word it describes

In English, red is red. The cat is red, the house is red, the shoes are red. Spanish colours that end in -o change their ending to match the group.

Now look at the colours that do not end in -o: verde, azul, gris, marrón, rosa, naranja. None of those change at all. El libro verde, la silla verde. El gato gris, la casa gris.

What matters here: only the -o colours change, and they change to -a. The rest stay exactly as they are.

Notice something else in those examples. The colour comes after the thing, not before it. A Spanish speaker says the cat black. That takes a few days to stop feeling upside down.

One, and more than one

Making things plural is easier than in English, because there are no words like mice or geese to learn.

And the colour follows along: los gatos negros, las casas blancas, los libros azules. Everything in the sentence ends up agreeing with everything else, which is why Spanish sentences often rhyme a little by accident.

So how do you know which group a word is in?

Most of the time the ending tells you. A word ending in -o is almost always in the el group, and a word ending in -a is almost always in the la group. That covers a great many words, including nearly all of the ones in this course.

It does not cover all of them, and you should know that now rather than be ambushed later. El día means the day and ends in -a. La mano means the hand and ends in -o. Words ending in other letters, like el color and la flor, simply have to be learned.

Here is the trick that actually works, and every good Spanish teacher uses it. Never learn the bare word. Learn the little word in front of it. Do not learn casa. Learn la casa. Do not learn perro. Learn el perro. It costs you one extra syllable now and saves you a thousand guesses later.

Naming the colours in your own room

Look up from the page. Find one thing of each colour and say it as a small Spanish phrase, guessing the group from the ending you would expect.

• Something red: el libro rojo, the red book.
• Something white: la pared blanca, the white wall. Pared (pah-REHD) is wall.
• Something blue: los calcetines azules, the blue socks.
• Something green: la planta verde, the green plant.
• Something black: el gato negro, if you are lucky enough to have one.

For the grown-up helping

Say the little word every time you say a noun, and ask the child to do the same. La mesa, not mesa. It sounds fussy for about a week and then it is simply how the word sounds, and the child gets the group for free instead of learning it twice. Do not correct a wrong el or la mid-sentence. Wait until they finish, then repeat the phrase back correctly as if you were agreeing with them. That is how this particular thing is learned by children in Spain and Mexico too.

Common misconceptions

• El is for boys and la is for girls. It is true for people, but a table and a spoon are not boys or girls. Every word has a group, and most of the time the ending is the clue.
• All colours change their ending. Only the ones ending in -o do. Verde, azul, gris, marrón, rosa and naranja never change.
• The colour goes before the thing, as in English. It goes after: la casa blanca, not la blanca casa.
• A word ending in -a is always la. Nearly always, but el día is a day, and you will meet others.

Recap

• Spanish has two words for the: el and la. For many things they become los and las.
• Ten colours: rojo, azul, amarillo, verde, negro, blanco, gris, marrón, rosa, naranja.
• Colours ending in -o change to -a to match a la word. The others do not change.
• The colour comes after the thing: el gato negro.
• Add -s after a vowel and -es after a consonant to make it plural.
• Learn every new word with its el or la attached, from today onwards.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish nouns: gender and plural formation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish determiners: el, la, los, las, un, una. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). rojo. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Gender of nouns; forms of adjectives. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

Why a Spanish name is longer than yours

The actor the world calls Penélope Cruz is registered in Spain as Penélope Cruz Sánchez. Cruz came from her father. Sánchez came from her mother. Almost everybody in Spain carries two surnames like that, one from each parent, and a woman does not usually change her name when she marries.

So a Spanish child's name is already a small family tree. That is a good place to start, because this lesson is about the people in a family and how to introduce them.

Meet a family, one person at a time

Here is a family to practise on. Their names are Lucía, Mateo, Carmen, Javier and Abuela Rosa. Take them one at a time and the words will arrive as you need them.

Lucía is nine. She would say: Me llamo Lucía. Tengo nueve años. You can already say both of those about yourself.

Lucía has a brother, Mateo, who is six. She says: Tengo un hermano. TEHN-goh oon ehr-MAH-noh. I have one brother.

If Mateo were a girl she would say tengo una hermana. The word changes its last letter and so does the little word in front of it. You saw this pattern with colours in the last lesson. Here it is again with people, which is the one place where it really does mean boy or girl.

Hijo and hija both start with a silent h, and the j is that throaty sound you met in rojo. EE-hoh, EE-hah.

The two words that do not follow the pattern

Lucía's mother and father are Carmen and Javier.

Madre and padre both end in -e, so neither of them swaps an o for an a. They are just a pair of words to learn. Mamá and papá are what a child actually says at home, and they keep the accent mark that pulls the push onto the last part.

One word that covers everybody

Now something Spanish does that English cannot. When a group has both boys and girls in it, Spanish uses the boy word in the plural for the whole group.

So mis padres means my parents, not my fathers, and Lucía saying tengo dos hermanos might mean two brothers or one brother and one sister. Spanish speakers work out which one from what is going on around them, the same way you work out who somebody means when they say the kids.

The upshot: the -os ending on a family word usually means the whole mixed group, not just the boys.

My, and my several

Mi means my. If there is more than one of them, mi becomes mis. That is the only change.

• mi hermano, my brother. mis hermanos, my brothers and sisters.
• mi abuela, my grandmother. mis abuelos, my grandparents.
• mi familia, my family. There is only ever one of those, so mi it stays.

Tu (too) means your, and it works the same way: tu madre, tus hermanos.

Introducing somebody

To point at a person and say who they are, you need two short words: este (EHS-teh) for a boy or man, and esta (EHS-tah) for a girl or woman. Both mean this.

• Este es mi padre. (EHS-teh ehs mee PAH-dreh) This is my father.
• Esta es mi hermana. (EHS-tah ehs mee ehr-MAH-nah) This is my sister.
• Esta es mi abuela. Se llama Rosa. This is my grandmother. She is called Rosa.

Es means is. You have now met three of the most common words in Spanish without being told to learn them: tengo, se llama, and es.

A conversation to act out

Two people. Read it once as written, then again with your own real answers.

• Ana: ¿Tienes hermanos? (TYEH-nehs ehr-MAH-nohs) Do you have any brothers or sisters?
• Leo: Sí, tengo una hermana. (Yes, I have one sister.)
• Ana: ¿Cómo se llama? (What is she called?)
• Leo: Se llama Lucía. Tiene seis años. (She is called Lucía. She is six.)
• Ana: Yo no tengo hermanos. (I do not have any brothers or sisters.)

No tengo hermanos is the whole answer if you are an only child. Spanish puts its no at the front and leaves it there.

Tiene seis años is worth a second look. Tengo is I have and tiene is he or she has. One letter apart, and you now have both.

For the grown-up helping

This is the lesson where a child may ask about a family that does not look like the one in the table, and the honest answer is the simple one: the Spanish words name the roles, and a child says the words that fit the people they live with. Mis abuelos, mis tíos, mi madre, mis padres, or a name on its own, all work. If the child would rather practise on a family they invent, or on the family in a picture book, that works just as well for the language and is nobody's business but theirs.

Common misconceptions

• Los padres means the fathers. Nearly always it means the parents. Spanish uses the -os form for a mixed group.
• Mis is a different word from mi. It is the same word with an s, used when there is more than one of the thing.
• Madre becomes madro for a man. Madre and padre are a separate pair. Only the -o and -a words swap endings.
• Tengo and tiene are interchangeable. Tengo is I have and tiene is he or she has, so Tiene ocho años is about somebody else.

Pulling it together

• la madre, el padre, el hermano, la hermana, el abuelo, la abuela, el tío, la tía, el primo, la prima.
• Most family words come in an -o and -a pair, but madre and padre do not.
• Los hermanos, los padres and los abuelos usually mean the whole mixed group.
• Mi becomes mis when there is more than one: mi hermano, mis hermanos.
• Este es and Esta es introduce a person: Esta es mi abuela.
• Tengo is I have, tiene is he or she has.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish naming customs: two surnames, one from each parent. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). madre. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Nociones específicas: identidad personal y relaciones familiares, niveles A1-A2. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Possessive adjectives; gender of nouns referring to people. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

Four sentences that introduce a dog

Tengo un perro. Se llama Rocky. Es blanco y negro. Tiene tres años.

I have a dog. He is called Rocky. He is white and black. He is three years old.

You can already build three of those four sentences from earlier lessons. This lesson gives you the animals, then a set of five steps you can run on any pet at all, including one you have made up.

One new word before you start: y (ee) means and. It is the smallest useful word in Spanish.

The animals people keep

El pez does something odd in the plural. The z turns into a c, so one fish is el pez and several are los peces (LOS PEH-sehs). Spanish does that whenever a word ending in z goes plural.

The animals on a farm

Say la vaca out loud. The v is a b, so it is BAH-kah, and a Spanish child would look puzzled if you said VAH-kah.

The five steps, worked on a dog

Here is the procedure. Follow it in order and you will not get lost.

1. Pick the animal with its little word. el perro.
2. Say you have one. El becomes un, because you are counting. Tengo un perro.
3. Name it. Se llama Rocky.
4. Colour it. Es means is. Perro is an el word, so an -o colour keeps its -o. Es blanco y negro.
5. Age it. Tiene tres años.

Read the four sentences again as one piece: Tengo un perro. Se llama Rocky. Es blanco y negro. Tiene tres años.

The same five steps with a cat, and watch what flips

Now run the procedure again, changing one thing: the animal is a female cat. In Spanish, el gato is a male cat and la gata is a female one.

1. Pick it: la gata.
2. Have one: la becomes una. Tengo una gata.
3. Name it: Se llama Luna.
4. Colour it: gata is a la word, so blanco becomes blanca. Es blanca y gris.
5. Age it: Tiene dos años.

Bottom line: changing the animal from el to la changed three words in three different sentences. Un became una, gato became gata, and blanco became blanca. Gris did not move, because it does not end in -o.

That is the whole of Spanish matching in one worked example. It is worth reading the two lists side by side until you can see exactly which words moved.

What the animals say

Animals make the same noises everywhere. People write those noises down differently, and this is one of the funniest things about learning any language.

The cockerel is the best one. A Spanish cockerel and an English cockerel make exactly the same noise at exactly the same unreasonable hour. One country writes it cock-a-doodle-doo and the other writes it quiquiriquí. Neither is right. Both are somebody having a go at a sound with the letters they had.

Guau is in the Spanish dictionary as a proper word, which means a Spanish writer can put guau in a book the way an English writer puts woof.

A farm song you already know the tune to

Old MacDonald Had a Farm was printed in 1906 and recorded in 1917, so it is old enough that anybody may sing it. Sing it exactly as you always do, but put a Spanish animal on the farm and let it make its Spanish noise.

• Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. And on that farm he had una vaca, E-I-E-I-O. With a mu mu here and a mu mu there.
• Next verse: un perro, with a guau guau here.
• Then: un gallo, with a quiquiriquí here, which is difficult to fit into the tune and is much funnier for that reason.

Watch the un and una. Una vaca, because vaca is a la word. Un perro and un gallo, because those are el words.

For the grown-up helping

The five steps matter more than the animal list. If the child can run the steps on a real pet, an imaginary one and a cuddly toy, they have a sentence pattern they can carry into every later lesson, and the animals are just the vocabulary passing through it. Ask them to do the flip on purpose: introduce the same pet twice, once as a boy animal and once as a girl animal, and say out loud which words changed.

Common misconceptions

• Animal noises are the same in every language. The noise is. The spelling is not. A Spanish cockerel says quiquiriquí.
• La vaca starts with a v sound. Spanish b and v are one sound, so it is BAH-kah.
• Gato means cat and gata is a spelling mistake. Gato is a male cat and gata is a female one, and the words around them change too.
• Every plural just adds s. A word ending in z swaps it for c first: el pez, los peces.

The takeaway

• Pets: el perro, el gato, el pájaro, el pez, el conejo, la tortuga.
• Farm: la vaca, el caballo, el cerdo, la oveja, la gallina, el gallo, el pato, el burro.
• Five steps introduce any animal: pick it, tengo, se llama, es plus a colour, tiene plus an age.
• Switching from an el animal to a la animal changes un to una and an -o colour to -a.
• guau guau, miau, mu, quiquiriquí, cuac cuac, bee.
• y means and.

Sources

1. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). guau: Spanish onomatopoeia for a dog barking. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias: the cockerel and the cat across languages. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Old MacDonald Had a Farm: written and published 1906, recorded 1917. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). vaca. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
5. Real Academia Española. (2014). guau; pez; gato. Diccionario de la lengua española (23rd ed.). Madrid: Espasa.

The caller says tócate la cabeza, and you freeze

You are standing in a circle. Somebody calls out: Simón dice: tócate la cabeza. Everybody else touches their head. You are still standing there working out what happened, and you are out.

There are only three things in that sentence. Simón dice means Simon says. Tócate means touch your. La cabeza is the head. Get those fourteen body words and five commands and you can play the whole game, which is the fastest way anybody has ever learned the parts of the body in a new language, because you are moving while you are listening.

You, from the top down

La mano is the one to watch. It ends in -o and it is still a la word, exactly as promised two lessons ago. This is the moment you find out whether you took the advice about learning the little word with the word.

The parts that come in twos

Most of a body comes in pairs, so most of these words get used in the plural, and you already know how to make one.

• el ojo becomes los ojos (lohs OH-hohs), the eyes.
• la mano becomes las manos (lahs MAH-nohs), the hands.
• el pie becomes los pies (lohs pyehs), the feet. No irregular word like feet exists in Spanish. You add an s and you are done.
• la oreja becomes las orejas, and el diente becomes los dientes.
• la nariz ends in z, so it becomes las narices, with the z turning into a c, exactly as el pez did.

Why Spanish says the head and not your head

In English you say touch your head. In Spanish the caller says tócate la cabeza, which is closer to touch yourself the head.

Spanish leaves out the word for your when it is completely obvious whose head is involved. Since the caller is talking to you, and you are touching yourself, whose head could it be? So Spanish uses the ordinary little word la and lets the rest be understood.

So what?: if you say tócate mi cabeza you have asked somebody to touch your head instead of theirs, which is a different game.

Five commands

Now put a command in front of a body part and you have an instruction.

• Tócate la nariz. Touch your nose.
• Levanta la mano. Put your hand up.
• Cierra los ojos. Close your eyes.
• Abre la boca. Open your mouth.
• Mueve los pies. Move your feet.

Playing Simón dice

The rules are the rules you already know. If the caller says Simón dice before the command, you do it. If they give the command on its own, you must not move, and anybody who moves is out.

The game has travelled all over the world and changed its name on the way. French children play Jacques a dit, and Turkish children play Yakup der ki. A survey of the game records a Spanish version that uses the order word by itself, Mando, meaning I order. Simón dice is the version used here.

Here is a round to read out loud. Do the actions as you read, and catch yourself out on the two that have no Simón dice in front of them.

• Simón dice: tócate la cabeza.
• Simón dice: levanta la mano.
• Tócate la oreja.
• Simón dice: cierra los ojos.
• Simón dice: abre la boca.
• Mueve los pies.
• Simón dice: tócate la nariz y la barriga.

Numbers three and six are the traps. If you moved on either of them you would be out.

When something hurts

One more sentence, and this one is genuinely useful if you ever travel.

Me duele la cabeza. meh DWEH-leh lah kah-BEH-sah. My head hurts.

Me duele means it hurts me. Swap the body part and you can report almost anything: Me duele la barriga. Me duele el diente. Me duele el pie.

If two things hurt at once, duele becomes duelen: Me duelen los pies. My feet hurt. The word grows an n when the thing doing the hurting is plural.

For the grown-up helping

Play this standing up, with everybody in the room joining in, including you. A child who is moving while they listen learns these words in one sitting, and a child who is reading a list of them will need four sittings. Speed up as you go, and put the traps closer together. Being caught out is the fun part and should stay that way, so keep rounds short and start everybody again rather than leaving anybody sitting out for long.

Common misconceptions

• La mano must be el mano because it ends in -o. It is one of the well-known exceptions and it takes la.
• Tócate la cabeza means touch the head, so any head will do. The te in tócate means yourself, so it is your own head.
• You say mi cabeza for my head in these commands. Spanish leaves out the word for my when it is obvious, and uses la instead.
• Pie becomes an odd plural like feet. It just adds an s: los pies.

Summing up

• Head to toe: la cabeza, el pelo, la cara, el ojo, la oreja, la nariz, la boca, el diente, el brazo, la mano, el dedo, la barriga, la pierna, el pie.
• Pairs go plural in the ordinary way: los ojos, las manos, los pies, las orejas.
• La nariz becomes las narices, because a z turns into a c before -es.
• Five commands: tócate, levanta, cierra, abre, mueve.
• Spanish says tócate la cabeza, using la where English uses your.
• Me duele la cabeza means my head hurts, and Me duelen los pies means my feet hurt.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Simon Says: the game in other languages. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). cabeza. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Nociones específicas: el cuerpo humano, niveles A1-A2. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). The definite article with parts of the body; doler. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

One sentence about this morning

Llevo una camiseta roja, unos pantalones azules y unos zapatos negros.

I am wearing a red t-shirt, blue trousers and black shoes. Eleven words, and they describe a real child on a real Tuesday.

This lesson is a set of five steps that will build that sentence about whatever you actually have on right now. Look down at yourself before you start, because you are going to need to know.

The clothes

Sombrero is worth stopping on. In English it means one particular wide Mexican hat. In Spanish it means any hat at all, including a bobble hat. It comes from sombra, meaning shade, so a sombrero is literally a shader, a thing that makes shadow. The big Mexican one has its own longer name, sombrero de charro.

And vaqueros is a small joke hiding in plain sight. Un vaquero is a cowboy, from vaca, the cow you met last lesson. Jeans are cowboy trousers.

Five steps to describe an outfit

1. Start with llevo (YEH-boh). It means I am wearing. Two l again, so it is a y sound.
2. Choose the little word. One thing: un or una. More than one: unos or unas, both meaning some.
3. Name the clothing.
4. Put the colour after it, matching the group and the number.
5. Join the items with y.

Run it once, slowly. The clothing is a t-shirt, and it is red.

Step 1: Llevo. Step 2: camiseta is a la word and there is one, so una. Step 3: una camiseta. Step 4: roja, because camiseta is a la word. Step 5: nothing to join yet.

Llevo una camiseta roja.

Now add trousers. Pantalones is already plural, and it is an el word, so the little word is unos. Blue is azul, and for more than one it becomes azules.

Llevo una camiseta roja y unos pantalones azules.

The step that catches everybody

Look hard at that azules.

Two lessons ago you learned that verde, azul, gris and marrón never change. That was true, but only about the el and la groups. Every colour, without exception, changes when the thing is plural.

The core of it: a colour ending in a vowel adds -s, and a colour ending in a consonant adds -es. That is the same plural rule you learned for things, applied to the colour word.

Notice marrón dropping its accent mark in marrones. Once the word grows an extra part, the push lands on the right syllable without help, so the mark is no longer needed.

The same five steps on a freezing day

Change the input and run the procedure again. It is January and it is snowing.

Step 1: Llevo. Step 2 and 3: un abrigo, una bufanda (boo-FAHN-dah, a scarf), unos guantes (GWAHN-tehs, gloves), unas botas. Step 4: colours, matched. Step 5: y before the last one.

Llevo un abrigo negro, una bufanda roja, unos guantes grises y unas botas marrones.

Count the changes that the plural forced: grises grew an -es, marrones grew an -es and lost its accent, and unos and unas both came out instead of un and una. Nothing else moved.

Asking somebody else

To ask, you need ¿Qué llevas? (keh YEH-bahs), which means what are you wearing? To talk about a third person, llevo becomes lleva.

• Ana: ¿Qué llevas hoy? (What are you wearing today?)
• Leo: Llevo unos vaqueros y una camiseta verde. ¿Y tú?
• Ana: Llevo un vestido azul. Mi hermana lleva una falda negra.

Llevo for me, llevas for you, lleva for somebody else. You saw the same three-way pattern with tengo, tienes and tiene.

For the grown-up helping

Do this one in front of the wardrobe rather than at the table. Hold something up, say its Spanish name and its colour, and let the child repeat the whole phrase rather than the single word, because the phrase is what carries the matching. Mornings are the natural slot: one item named in Spanish while it is being put on costs nothing and happens every single day.

Common misconceptions

• A sombrero is only the big Mexican hat. In Spanish it is the word for any hat. The Mexican one is a sombrero de charro.
• Azul and gris never change. They do not change for el or la, but they do add -es when the thing is plural: azules, grises.
• Pantalones must be singular for one pair. Spanish keeps it plural, like English trousers, so it is unos pantalones.
• Llevo means I carry. It can, but with clothes it means I am wearing.

Where this leaves us

• Twelve clothes: la camiseta, la camisa, los pantalones, los vaqueros, el vestido, la falda, la chaqueta, el abrigo, los zapatos, los calcetines, la gorra, el sombrero.
• Llevo is I am wearing, llevas is you are wearing, lleva is he or she is wearing.
• Unos and unas mean some, and go in front of plural things.
• Every colour goes plural: add -s after a vowel, -es after a consonant.
• Sombrero comes from sombra, shade, and means any hat.

Sources

1. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). camisa. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sombrero: Spanish for hat, from sombra, and the Mexican sombrero de charro. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Nociones específicas: vestuario y objetos personales, niveles A1-A2. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Plural of adjectives; agreement. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

Two calendars, one week, seven arguments

Monday in Spanish is lunes. La luna is the moon. Monday in English is the moon's day. Those two languages agree.

Tuesday in Spanish is martes, after the Roman god Marte, who is Mars. Tuesday in English is named after Tiw, a god from the north of Europe entirely. Those two do not agree at all, and yet they are both naming the same day of the same week.

Here is why. The Romans spread a seven-day week across their empire, and each day carried the name of one of the seven things they could see moving in the sky. The Germanic peoples took the week and swapped in their own gods for the Roman ones, a swap historians call interpretatio germanica, which is how English ended up with Woden and Thor in the middle of its week. Spanish kept the Roman names almost untouched. Almost.

Now read the table across the last two rows. This is where Spanish breaks its own pattern. Sábado is not Saturn at all: it comes from the Sabbath. And domingo is not the Sun: it comes from the Latin for the Lord's day. English kept the old sky names for the weekend and Spanish changed them, which is exactly the opposite of what happens in the middle of the week.

Why this matters: the days of the week are not random noises. Five Spanish days are planets, and once you see that, lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves and viernes stop being five things to memorise.

One thing English does and Spanish does not

Spanish writes the days and the months in small letters. Not Lunes. Not Enero. It is lunes and enero, right in the middle of a sentence, with no capital letter anywhere.

The only time you capitalise one is the same time you capitalise anything: when it starts the sentence.

The twelve months

Nine of the twelve look almost like the English word, so the work here is much smaller than it looks. Watch the j in junio and julio: that throaty sound again, so HOO-nyoh and HOO-lyoh, never JOO-nee-oh.

Once to treinta y uno

You need these to give a date. The first five are their own words and simply have to be learned.

From sixteen onwards Spanish stops inventing and starts building. Sixteen is ten and six, squashed into one word.

• 16 dieciséis (dyeh-see-SAYS), from diez y seis.
• 17 diecisiete, 18 dieciocho, 19 diecinueve. Same trick every time.
• 20 veinte (BAYN-teh).
• 21 veintiuno, 22 veintidós, 23 veintitrés, and so on to 29 veintinueve.
• 30 treinta (TRAYN-tah).
• 31 treinta y uno. From thirty-one onwards the words come apart again, with a proper y in the middle.

So the squashing only happens twice, in the teens and the twenties. After treinta, Spanish writes the numbers as three separate words for good.

Your cumpleaños

Birthday in Spanish is el cumpleaños (ehl koom-pleh-AH-nyohs). Split it open and it is cumple plus años: the day you complete your years. It has años inside it, which is why it is always written with an s on the end even for one birthday.

A date is built like this: el, then the number, then de, then the month.

• el cinco de marzo, the fifth of March.
• el veintidós de julio, the twenty-second of July.
• el uno de enero, the first of January. Spanish uses the plain number, with nothing like the th in fifth or the st in first.

Now the two sentences you came for.

• ¿Cuándo es tu cumpleaños? (KWAHN-doh ehs too koom-pleh-AH-nyohs) When is your birthday?
• Mi cumpleaños es el trece de abril. My birthday is the thirteenth of April.

And the one everybody wants: ¡Feliz cumpleaños! (feh-LEES koom-pleh-AH-nyohs) Happy birthday.

Saying which day it is

To say what day it is today, put el in front of the day.

• Hoy es lunes. Today is Monday.
• Mañana es martes. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Mañana does two jobs: tomorrow, and morning.
• El sábado voy al parque. On Saturday I go to the park. Spanish says the Saturday where English says on Saturday.

For the grown-up helping

Put a paper calendar somewhere the child passes every day and write the Spanish day at the top of each square for one week. Ask ¿Qué día es hoy? at breakfast and accept a one-word answer. Birthdays are the strongest hook here, so collect them: write the family birthdays on the calendar in Spanish, el catorce de junio, and let the child be the one who announces the next one coming.

Common misconceptions

• Days and months take capital letters, as in English. In Spanish they do not: lunes, enero, martes.
• Sábado and domingo are named after Saturn and the Sun. Only the English ones are. Sábado comes from the Sabbath and domingo from the Latin for the Lord's day.
• Cumpleaños needs an s only for more than one birthday. The s is part of the word, because años is inside it.
• You say the first with a special word, like primero in English order. For a date, Spanish normally uses the plain number: el uno de enero.

What to carry forward

• lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, domingo, and none of them capitalised.
• Five of the seven are Roman planets. Sábado is the Sabbath and domingo is the Lord's day.
• enero to diciembre, with nine of the twelve close to their English cousins.
• once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, then dieciséis onwards by squashing, then treinta y uno.
• A date is el, the number, de, the month: el trece de abril.
• ¿Cuándo es tu cumpleaños? and Mi cumpleaños es el ... de ...

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Names of the days of the week: the Roman planetary week, interpretatio germanica, and the Romance replacement of Saturday and Sunday. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). lunes. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). Appendix: Spanish numerals, eleven to thirty-one. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2010). Uso de mayúsculas: días de la semana y meses. Ortografía de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa.

Christmas dinner in the garden

On the twenty-fifth of December in Madrid, people put coats on to walk to lunch. On the same day in Buenos Aires, families eat outside. December, January and February are the warmest months of the year in the southern half of the world, and Argentina is in the southern half.

Both cities speak Spanish. Both call the month diciembre. One of them is in the middle of el invierno and the other is in the middle of el verano, and neither of them is confused about it.

That is where this lesson starts, because the seasons are the one piece of vocabulary in this course that does not mean the same thing to every Spanish speaker on earth.

The four seasons, twice

Read the last two columns across. They are the same four blocks of months in a different order, because when one half of the world is tipped towards the sun the other half is tipped away.

Primavera has the word prima inside it, meaning first. Spring is the first season of the growing year. And otoño has that tilde, so it is oh-TOH-nyoh, with the ny sound in the middle.

In Spanish, the weather is something the day makes

English says it is sunny. Spanish says the day makes sun. The word is hace (AH-seh), and it does most of the work in this lesson.

El tiempo is a word that does two jobs at once. It means the weather, and it also means time. So ¿Qué tiempo hace? is asking about today's sky, not about the clock.

The three that refuse to use hace

Rain, snow and cloud go their own way.

• Llueve. (YWEH-beh) It is raining. One word. Two l, so a y sound at the start.
• Nieva. (NYEH-bah) It is snowing. Also one word, and the v is a b.
• Está nublado. (ehs-TAH noo-BLAH-doh) It is cloudy. Una nube is a cloud.

You can also talk about the rain as a thing: la lluvia (lah YOO-byah) is the rain, and la nieve (lah NYEH-beh) is the snow.

Remember: hace for sun, heat, cold and wind. Llueve and nieva stand alone. Está nublado for cloud.

Asking, and answering

¿Qué tiempo hace? keh TYEHM-poh AH-seh. What is the weather like?

Answer with one of the sentences above, and then say a bit more.

• Hace sol y hace calor. Es verano. (It is sunny and hot. It is summer.)
• Llueve y hace viento. No me gusta. (It is raining and windy. I do not like it.)
• Hace frío y nieva. Es invierno. (It is cold and snowing. It is winter.)

A year in two cities

Follow one year through, jumping between the two halves of the world. Say each line out loud.

• Enero en Madrid: hace frío. Es invierno.
• Enero en Buenos Aires: hace calor. Es verano.
• Abril en Madrid: llueve. Es primavera.
• Abril en Buenos Aires: hace viento. Es otoño.
• Julio en Madrid: hace mucho sol. Es verano.
• Julio en Buenos Aires: hace frío. Es invierno.

Mucho (MOO-choh) means a lot of. Hace mucho sol is it is very sunny, and hace mucho frío is it is very cold. It is a small word that makes every weather sentence you know twice as useful.

The weather is cold, and so am I

Here is the trap. Hace frío means the weather is cold. If you are the one who is cold, you do not use hace at all. You use tengo, the word you already know from your age.

Word for word, tengo frío is I have cold. Spanish treats being cold the way it treats being nine: as something you have rather than something you are. Say Soy frío and you have told somebody you are a cold person, which is not about the weather at all.

For the grown-up helping

Ask ¿Qué tiempo hace? once a day, at the window, and accept a two-word answer. This is the single easiest habit in the whole course to keep going, because the weather changes by itself and supplies a new sentence for free. If you have family or friends in the southern half of the world, a child who works out that their July is your January has understood something about the planet as well as about Spanish.

Common misconceptions

• Tengo frío and hace frío are the same. Tengo frío is about you. Hace frío is about the day.
• Verano always means June to August. Only north of the equator. In Argentina and Chile, verano is December to February.
• Llueve needs hace in front of it. It does not. Llueve is a whole sentence on its own.
• Tiempo means only time. It means the weather too, and ¿Qué tiempo hace? is about the sky.

Looking back

• la primavera, el verano, el otoño, el invierno, and they swap over between the two halves of the world.
• Hace sol, hace calor, hace frío, hace viento, hace buen tiempo, hace mal tiempo.
• Llueve and nieva stand alone. Está nublado covers cloud.
• ¿Qué tiempo hace? asks what the weather is like.
• Mucho means a lot: hace mucho frío.
• Tengo frío is about you, not about the weather.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Season: the hemispheres always experience opposite seasons, and December to February are the warmest months in the south. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). invierno. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). llover. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Hacer in weather expressions; tener with calor and frío. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

Standing at the stall with the wrong words

You are at a market stall. There is a pile of apples in front of you and some coins in your hand. You want two of them.

You know dos. That is the only part of this you know. You do not know the word for apples, you do not know how to ask for them politely, and you do not know how to find out what they cost. Three gaps, and this lesson fills all three, plus one extra thing you will use every day for the rest of your life: how to say what you like.

What is on the stall

And to drink: el agua (ehl AH-gwah) water, la leche (lah LEH-cheh) milk, el zumo (ehl SOO-moh) juice.

Juice has two names. In Spain it is el zumo. In Latin America and the Canary Islands it is el jugo (ehl HOO-goh). Both are completely ordinary words, and which one you hear tells you roughly where you are standing.

Notice el pollo, chicken the food, sitting one letter away from el pelo, hair. Two l make a y sound, so chicken is POH-yoh. Get it wrong at dinner and you have asked for hair.

Saying what you like, backwards

English says I like chocolate. Spanish says something closer to chocolate pleases me.

Me gusta el chocolate. meh GOOS-tah ehl choh-koh-LAH-teh.

That word order is why gusta behaves oddly. It is not describing you, it is describing the thing you like. So when the thing is plural, gusta grows an n.

Key idea: gusta or gustan depends on the food, never on you. Count the food, not the person.

To say you do not like something, put no at the very front and leave everything else alone.

• No me gusta el tomate. I do not like tomatoes.
• No me gustan las uvas. I do not like grapes.
• No me gusta nada. I do not like it at all. Nada means nothing.
• Me gusta mucho. I like it a lot.

And to ask somebody else, swap me for te: ¿Te gusta el pollo? Do you like chicken? ¿Te gustan las manzanas? Do you like apples?

Counting to cien

You have up to treinta y uno. Here are the rest of the tens, and there is a pattern running down the middle of them.

Every ten from forty to ninety is its small number with -enta stuck on the end. Once you see cuatro inside cuarenta and ocho inside ochenta, there are really only two new things here: noventa, which hides its nueve well, and cien.

Anything in between is the ten, then y, then the unit: cuarenta y cinco is 45, setenta y dos is 72, noventa y nueve is 99.

The market, done properly

Three new words and you can shop. Quiero (KYEH-roh) means I would like. ¿Cuánto cuesta? (KWAHN-toh KWEHS-tah) means how much does it cost? Aquí tiene (ah-KEE TYEH-neh) means here you are.

• Tú: Buenos días. ¿Cuánto cuestan las manzanas?
• Vendedora: Dos euros el kilo.
• Tú: Quiero dos manzanas, por favor.
• Vendedora: Aquí tiene. Son dos euros.
• Tú: Gracias. ¡Hasta luego!
• Vendedora: Adiós.

Cuesta and cuestan follow the same rule as gusta and gustan: one apple cuesta, many apples cuestan. Son means they come to, and it is what a shopkeeper says when adding up.

Notice that you already knew four of the lines in that conversation. Buenos días, por favor, gracias and hasta luego all came from the very first lesson.

For the grown-up helping

Run the market for real, with actual fruit on the kitchen table and coins or buttons as money. Be the stallholder yourself and refuse, kindly, to understand English. Put a paper price label on each item so the child has to read a Spanish number out loud to check what they owe. Fifteen minutes of that beats any amount of repeating after you, because the child has a reason to get the number right.

Common misconceptions

• Me gusto means I like. It does not. The word changes with the food, so it is me gusta or me gustan.
• Gustan is for when several people like something. It is for when several things are liked. Me gustan las uvas is still one person.
• No goes after me gusta. It goes right at the front: No me gusta el queso.
• Cien means a hundred of anything, in any form. Exactly a hundred is cien, and Spanish changes it to ciento when you go past a hundred.

The short version

• la manzana, el plátano, la naranja, las uvas, el tomate, el pan, el queso, el arroz, el pollo, el helado.
• To drink: el agua, la leche, el zumo in Spain and el jugo in Latin America.
• Me gusta for one thing, me gustan for several. No goes at the front.
• ¿Te gusta? asks somebody else.
• cuarenta, cincuenta, sesenta, setenta, ochenta, noventa, cien, and everything between made with y.
• Quiero, ¿Cuánto cuesta? and Aquí tiene will get you through any market stall.

Sources

1. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). gustar. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). jugo: juice in Latin America and the Canary Islands, with zumo given for Spain. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). manzana. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Nociones específicas: alimentación; compras. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
5. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Gustar and similar verbs; cien and ciento. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

A note with four things wrong with it

A child writing to a pen friend in Valencia sends this:

Yo soy en la clase. Tengo un rojo libro y dos azul lápices. La profesor es muy simpático.

Every word in it is a real Spanish word, spelled correctly. The pen friend will work out what it means. And there are four separate mistakes in those seventeen words, each of them a mistake that almost every beginner makes, so it is worth taking the note apart one piece at a time.

First, though, the words you need.

What is in the room

Spanish speakers shorten el bolígrafo to el boli almost all the time, the way English speakers say maths instead of mathematics. And las tijeras is plural in Spanish just as scissors is plural in English, because both languages noticed that scissors come in twos.

Mistake one: soy is not where you are

The note began Yo soy en la clase. Yo means I, and soy means I am. It looks perfect.

Spanish has two different words for am, and English has only one. This is the single biggest difference between the two languages and it is worth getting straight now.

You have been using estoy since the very first lesson without being told. ¿Cómo estás? is the same word, asking how you are today rather than who you are for ever.

So the fix is Estoy en la clase. And the yo can go, because estoy already says I. Spanish drops the word for I most of the time, and putting it in makes the sentence sound like you are insisting.

In short: soy for who you are, estoy for where you are and how you feel.

Mistake two: the colour is in the wrong place

Un rojo libro puts the colour in front, as English does. Spanish puts it after.

The fix is un libro rojo.

This one feels wrong for about a fortnight and then it feels normal, and the way to get through the fortnight is to say the whole phrase out loud rather than to remember a rule.

Mistake three: the colour did not go plural, and neither did the pencil

Dos azul lápices has two problems stacked on top of each other.

The colour has to match a plural thing, and azul ends in a consonant, so it becomes azules. And el lápiz ends in z, so it does what el pez and la nariz did: the z becomes a c before the ending. One pencil is el lápiz and several are los lápices.

Notice something extra. El lápiz carries an accent mark and los lápices does not need one, because the word grew a part and the push landed in the right place by itself. That is the same thing marrón did when it became marrones.

The fix is dos lápices azules.

Mistake four: the teacher does not match

La profesor mixes the two groups. La belongs with a la word and profesor is an el word.

If the teacher is a woman, the word itself changes: la profesora. If the teacher is a man, it is el profesor. Then everything that describes the teacher has to follow.

• El profesor es muy simpático. The teacher is very nice, about a man.
• La profesora es muy simpática. The teacher is very nice, about a woman.

Muy (mwee) means very, and simpático means nice or friendly. It is not the same as sympathetic, which is a trap English speakers fall into constantly.

The note, repaired

Estoy en la clase. Tengo un libro rojo y dos lápices azules. La profesora es muy simpática.

Read the broken version and the fixed version one after the other. Four changes, and each one came from a rule you had already met in an earlier lesson. That is what most beginner mistakes turn out to be: not new problems, but old rules that were not carried across into a new sentence.

Two more sentences for the classroom

• ¿Qué es esto? (keh ehs EHS-toh) What is this? Point at anything and ask.
• Es una regla. It is a ruler.
• No entiendo. (noh ehn-TYEHN-doh) I do not understand. This is possibly the most useful sentence in any language.

For the grown-up helping

Write the four broken sentences on a slip of paper and let the child hunt the mistakes without being told how many there are. Finding an error in somebody else's writing is far easier than avoiding it in your own, and it is the step that comes first. Then ask them to write one short note of their own about the room they are sitting in, and check it against the same four questions: soy or estoy, colour after the thing, everything plural together, and does the little word match.

Common misconceptions

• Soy means am, so it works everywhere. For where you are and how you feel, Spanish uses estoy.
• You must say yo for I. Spanish usually leaves it out, because estoy and tengo already say who is speaking.
• Simpático means sympathetic. It means nice or friendly.
• Lápiz just adds an s. The z turns into a c first, giving lápices, and the accent mark is then no longer needed.

Recap

• la clase, la escuela, el libro, el cuaderno, el lápiz, el bolígrafo, la goma, la regla, la mochila, las tijeras, la pizarra, el profesor.
• Soy is who you are. Estoy is where you are and how you feel.
• Colours go after the thing: un libro rojo.
• Plural means everything goes plural: dos lápices azules.
• El profesor and la profesora, and what follows has to match.
• ¿Qué es esto? and No entiendo will get you a long way in any classroom.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Romance copula: the Spanish copulas ser and estar, including estar for location. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). lápiz. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). estar. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Ser and estar; position of adjectives. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

A Spanish word in an English garden

There is a Spanish word sitting in thousands of English gardens, and almost nobody who says it knows that it is Spanish. The word is patio. In English it means a paved bit outside the back door. In Spanish it means a courtyard: the open square of sky in the middle of a house, with the rooms looking inwards onto it.

In Córdoba, in the south of Spain, those courtyards are famous enough to be protected as world heritage. For two weeks every year the people of the old centre open their private patios to anybody who wants to walk in, and the patios compete for a prize, judged on the building and on the flowers.

So this lesson walks through a house, room by room, starting at the front door.

Room by room

La cocina is the kitchen, and it is also the word for cooking. El baño means both the bathroom and a bath. Spanish is happy to let one word do two jobs when the meaning is obvious from where you are standing.

What is inside

You already have la mesa and la silla from the colours lesson, which means you can furnish most of a room already.

Hay: the word that fills a house

Hay (eye) means there is, and it also means there are. One word, both jobs, no changes ever. It is one of the friendliest words in Spanish.

• En mi casa hay tres habitaciones. In my house there are three bedrooms.
• En la cocina hay una nevera. In the kitchen there is a fridge.
• En mi habitación hay una cama, una mesa y una lámpara.
• No hay jardín. There is no garden.

Notice habitación becoming habitaciones, and losing its accent mark on the way, exactly as marrón and lápiz did.

Where exactly is the cat?

To say where one particular thing is, you need está (ehs-TAH), which is the same estar you met as estoy. Estoy is where I am. Está is where it is.

• El gato está debajo de la cama. The cat is under the bed.
• El libro está encima de la mesa. The book is on top of the table.
• La silla está al lado de la ventana. The chair is next to the window.
• La mochila está detrás de la puerta. The backpack is behind the door.

The point: hay says that something exists somewhere. Está says where one particular thing is. En mi habitación hay una cama, and la cama está al lado de la ventana.

Where you live

One more sentence, and it goes straight into the introduction you will perform in the last lesson.

Vivo en (BEE-boh ehn) means I live in.

• Vivo en una casa. I live in a house.
• Vivo en un piso. I live in a flat.
• Vivo en Manchester. I live in Manchester.
• Vivo en Inglaterra. I live in England.

To ask somebody else, it is ¿Dónde vives? (DOHN-deh BEE-behs), where do you live? Dónde means where, and you have now met it in a question for the first time.

A walk through one house

Read this out loud as one piece. Every word in it has appeared in this course.

Vivo en una casa pequeña. En la casa hay una cocina, un salón, un baño y dos habitaciones. En mi habitación hay una cama, una mesa y una lámpara azul. Mi gato está debajo de la cama. No hay jardín, pero hay un patio pequeño.

Pequeña means small, and pero is the word for but that you met back in the lesson on rolled r, with one r rather than two. Grande (GRAHN-deh) is big, and like verde it never changes its ending for el or la.

For the grown-up helping

Walk the house together and label four doors with sticky notes: la cocina, el baño, el salón, la habitación. Leave them up for a week. Then play hide the object: put something somewhere and let the child tell you in Spanish where it is, using está and one of the five position words. The child who has to say debajo de la cama in order to win the game will remember debajo, and the child who reads it in a list will not.

Common misconceptions

• Hay changes for one thing and many things. It never changes. Hay una cama and hay tres camas both use hay.
• Hay and está do the same job. Hay says something exists. Está says where a particular thing is.
• A patio in Spanish is the paved bit by the back door. It is a courtyard, often right in the middle of the house.
• El baño is only a bath. It is the bathroom as well, and that is the meaning you will need when you are out.

Where this leaves us

• la casa, el piso, la cocina, el salón, la habitación, el baño, el jardín, el patio.
• Inside: la puerta, la ventana, la cama, el sofá, la lámpara, la nevera.
• Hay means there is and there are, and never changes.
• Está says where one thing is: debajo de, encima de, al lado de, detrás de, en.
• Vivo en says where you live, and ¿Dónde vives? asks somebody else.
• Patio is a Spanish word English borrowed, and in Spanish it is a courtyard.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Patio: Spanish for courtyard, forecourt, yard or little garden. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Córdoba, Spain: the Festival de los Patios, recognised as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, in which private courtyards open to the public and compete. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). cocina. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Hay; estar for location; prepositional phrases of place. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.

Five hundred and nineteen million people

About 519 million people speak Spanish as their first language. That makes it second in the world, behind only Mandarin Chinese. It is an official language in twenty-one countries and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

And it did not start out that big. Spanish grew out of the Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula and took shape in the Kingdom of Castile, a stretch of north-central Spain. Everything below came from there.

Get a map or a globe now, or open one, because the rest of this lesson is a table and you should be able to point at each row.

Six countries, one fact each

Now read the table down the Where column. Europe, North America, South America, Central America, Africa. Spanish is not a European language that a few other places borrowed. Far more Spanish speakers live in the Americas than in Spain, and Mexico alone has more of them than Spain does, several times over.

What matters here: when somebody says Spanish, the picture in your head should be a map of the Atlantic with land on both sides of it, not a single country.

The strangest spelling in the list

Look at México again. It is spelled with an x and said with the throaty j sound from rojo: MEH-hee-koh. That x is one of the few leftovers of an older way of spelling, and it survives in place names. Say MEK-si-koh and everybody will understand you, but a Mexican child would not recognise it as the name of home.

Argentina and Guinea both hide a sound too. In Argentina, the g before an e is that same throaty sound: ar-hehn-TEE-nah. In Guinea, the u after the g is silent and only there to keep the g hard: gee-NEH-ah. Spanish does this with gue and gui everywhere, which is why a guitarra is a gee-TAH-rrah.

Two more facts worth carrying

Costa Rica is the row children usually want to hear twice. In 1949, after a short civil war, the country wrote a new constitution that got rid of its army permanently, and it has not had one since. It is one of a very small number of countries in the world with no standing army at all.

Aconcagua, in Argentina, is the highest mountain anywhere in the Americas. It stands in the Andes, the long spine of mountains that runs down the western edge of South America through several Spanish-speaking countries at once.

Saying where you are from

Two sentences, and they both go into the introduction you perform next lesson.

• ¿De dónde eres? deh DOHN-deh EH-rehs. Where are you from?
• Soy de Inglaterra. I am from England.

Soy, not estoy. Where you are from is part of who you are, not where you are standing, and this is the clearest example of that difference in the whole course. You can be in Madrid and still be from Manchester.

The same -o and -a pattern you have seen since the colours lesson, doing one more job. And Soy de plus the country works for everybody, whichever word you would use, so it is the safe one to reach for.

One Spanish, many Spanishes

You have already met four places where Spanish speakers do not agree with each other, and every one of them was normal.

• Gracias is GRAH-syahs in Latin America and GRAH-thyahs in most of Spain.
• Calle is KAH-yeh nearly everywhere and closer to KAH-zheh in Argentina and Uruguay.
• Juice is el zumo in Spain and el jugo in Latin America.
• December is the middle of summer in Argentina and the middle of winter in Spain.

None of that makes any of them wrong. English does exactly the same thing between London, Dublin and Sydney, and nobody thinks one of those cities is speaking badly.

For the grown-up helping

Pin up a world map and put a sticker on each of the six countries as it is learned. The geography is doing as much work here as the Spanish: a child who can point at Guinea Ecuatorial has understood something that a list of twenty-one country names would never have given them. If anybody in your family or street speaks Spanish, ask them which country they are from and add a sticker for that one too, with their name next to it.

Common misconceptions

• Spanish is mostly spoken in Spain. Mexico alone has several times as many Spanish speakers as Spain does.
• México is said with a ks sound. The x there is the throaty j sound: MEH-hee-koh.
• Everyone speaking Spanish says the same words. Zumo and jugo both mean juice, and both are correct where they are used.
• Estoy de Inglaterra is how you say where you are from. Where you are from uses soy, because it is part of who you are.

Putting it together

• About 519 million people speak Spanish as a first language, and it is official in twenty-one countries.
• España, México, Argentina, Perú, Costa Rica, Guinea Ecuatorial, on four continents.
• Mexico has the most Spanish speakers of any country. Guinea Ecuatorial is the only one in Africa.
• Costa Rica abolished its army in 1949. Aconcagua, in Argentina, is the highest mountain in the Americas.
• ¿De dónde eres? and Soy de plus your country.
• Spanish sounds different in different places, and all of those places are speaking it properly.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish language: 519 million native speakers, official in 21 countries, origin in the Kingdom of Castile, and Mexico as the country with the largest number of speakers. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Equatorial Guinea: the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa, where Spanish is the main official language. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Costa Rica: the 1949 constitution permanently abolished the army. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Aconcagua: the highest mountain in the Americas, in the Andes of Argentina. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Machu Picchu: a fifteenth-century Inca citadel in Peru. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Nine lines, and you have already written most of them

Here is a whole introduction, spoken by a nine-year-old called Sofía who has done exactly the fifteen lessons you have done.

• ¡Hola! Buenos días.
• Me llamo Sofía.
• Tengo nueve años.
• Soy de Inglaterra. Vivo en Manchester.
• Vivo en una casa pequeña. En mi casa hay dos habitaciones.
• Tengo un hermano. Se llama Tom. Tiene seis años.
• Tengo un perro. Se llama Rocky. Es blanco y negro.
• Me gusta el chocolate. No me gusta el queso.
• Mi cumpleaños es el trece de abril. ¡Gracias! ¡Hasta luego!

Count the lessons hiding in there. The greeting came from lesson one. The number came from lesson four. The colours came from lesson five, the brother from lesson six, the dog from lesson seven, the house from lesson fourteen, the birthday from lesson ten, the chocolate from lesson twelve, and soy de from lesson fifteen. Nothing in it is new.

This lesson is a procedure for building your own version, and then a way of performing it.

Line by line, with the choice you have to make

Write yours out on paper before you say it. Writing it first is not cheating. It is what every actor does.

A second one, so you can watch what changes

Here is the same nine lines for a different child: a boy of eleven in Dublin with two sisters, a cat and no garden.

• ¡Hola! Buenas tardes.
• Me llamo Daniel. Tengo once años.
• Soy de Irlanda. Vivo en Dublín, en un piso grande.
• Tengo dos hermanas. Se llaman Kate y Ruby.
• Tengo una gata. Se llama Luna. Es negra y blanca.
• Me gustan los plátanos. No me gusta el pollo.
• Mi cumpleaños es el veintidós de septiembre. ¡Hasta luego!

Six things changed shape, not just the words. Buenos días became buenas tardes. Un hermano became dos hermanas. Se llama became se llaman, because there are two of them. Un gato became una gata and negro became negra. And me gusta became me gustan, because plátanos is plural.

Worth holding on to: the things that change are almost always the same three. Does the little word match, does the colour match, and is it one thing or several.

The conversation

An introduction is a speech. A conversation is harder, because somebody else is in it. Learn both sides of this one, then perform it with a partner who reads from the page while you do not.

• A: ¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?
• B: Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y tú?
• A: Bien. ¿Cómo te llamas?
• B: Me llamo Daniel. ¿Y tú?
• A: Me llamo Sofía. Mucho gusto. ¿Cuántos años tienes?
• B: Tengo once años. ¿De dónde eres?
• A: Soy de Inglaterra. ¿Tienes hermanos?
• B: Sí, tengo dos hermanas. ¿Te gusta el chocolate?
• A: Sí, me gusta mucho. ¡Hasta luego!
• B: ¡Adiós!

Notice how often ¿Y tú? appears. Handing the question back is what keeps a conversation alive, and it costs you two words.

How to perform it

1. Say it slower than feels right. Every beginner speeds up when nervous, and speeding up is what makes Spanish hard to follow.
2. Look up at the end of each line. Not the middle. The end.
3. Pause where the full stops are. Nine short sentences are much easier to follow than one long one.
4. If you get stuck, say No entiendo or start the line again. Nobody minds. Starting the line again is what Spanish speakers do too.
5. Do it three times. The first is for finding the mistakes, the second is for fixing them, the third is the performance.

The checklist for the grown-up listening

Listen to the whole thing without stopping the child once. Then go through these six, and mention at most two of them.

1. Vowels. Is every a an ah and every e an eh, all the way through?
2. The silent h. Hola, hermano, hay. No breath on any of them.
3. The double l. Me llamo and se llama, with a y sound.
4. Matching. un with an el word, una with a la word, and the colour matching the animal.
5. Tengo and soy. Tengo for the age and the family, soy for where they are from, vivo for where they live.
6. Gusta and gustan. One thing or several, counted on the food and not on the child.

Say what went right first and be specific about it, because a child who is told the ll was perfect will keep doing the ll. Guidance for teaching languages to young learners is consistent on this: performance improves when feedback is specific and the learner keeps speaking.

What a book cannot do for you

Here is the honest part. You have about two hundred words, nine sentence shapes and a good accent for a beginner. What you do not have is practice at understanding somebody else speaking at full speed, because a page cannot speak at you.

Three things fix that, in order of how much they help: talking to a person who speaks Spanish, watching something in Spanish with the sound on, and listening to songs in Spanish. All three work better than reading, and the first one is worth more than the other two together.

If nobody around you speaks Spanish, start with children's programmes you already know, in Spanish. You will recognise the story, which frees your ears up to catch the words. You will catch more than you expect, because you now have two hundred of them.

Common misconceptions

• You have to be perfect before you can speak to anybody. Nobody is, in any language. A beginner who talks gets better and a beginner who waits does not.
• Se llama covers everybody. For two or more people it becomes se llaman.
• Vivo en and soy de are interchangeable. Vivo en is where you live now. Soy de is where you are from.
• Speaking faster sounds more Spanish. It sounds less clear. Speed comes last, after everything else is right.

What to carry forward

• Nine lines make a complete introduction, and every one of them came from an earlier lesson.
• Me llamo, tengo, soy de, vivo en, hay, se llama, es, me gusta, mi cumpleaños es.
• Three things to check every time: does the little word match, does the colour match, one thing or several.
• ¿Y tú? hands the question back and keeps a conversation going.
• Slow down, pause at the full stops, and look up at the end of each line.
• The next step is a real person, real speech and real listening. The words are ready.

Sources

1. ACTFL. (n.d.). Guiding Principles for Language Learning. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. actfl.org
2. ACTFL. (n.d.). ACTFL Performance Descriptors for Language Learners. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. actfl.org
3. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Funciones: dar y pedir información personal. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. cvc.cervantes.es
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). Ser and estar; gustar; agreement of adjectives. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.). London: Hodder Education.