Articles

Daily dose of grammar for a beginner: forming easy sentences in Spanish

June 8, 2018

To be able to form simple sentences in Spanish, you need to know a few nouns, verbs, pronouns (I, you, he/she…) and common prepositions to help you indicate things like place and time. All these you can learn with WordDive.

When you start learning Spanish, one of the first things you’ll notice will probably be that – surprise, surprise – Spanish nouns have a gender. And learning genders might feel like a mission impossible, especially for those whose mother tongue does not have noun genders.

Luckily, Spanish nouns have only two genders: feminine la and masculine el, and there are plenty of handy shortcuts for learning them. For instance:

If the noun ends in an –o, it’s probably masculine. Masculine should also be your first guess if the word ends in the letters –e, –ma, –é, –í, –ó or –ú.
If the last letter is –a, then it’s usually a feminine noun. This is also the case with nouns ending in –d, –z tai –ión. There are exceptions, of course, but these rules of thumb are a great way to help you get started!

When you have learned a few words and their genders, you can start forming simple sentences. In Spanish, the word order is pretty free, so you can basically just put one word after the other. There are some rules, of course, that you will have to learn. For instance, the adjective usually comes after the noun and not before it, like in English.

Even if you cannot conjugate verbs in person or tense yet, you can start forming sentences by learning a few useful structures that you can use together with the basic forms of the main verb. Try these, for instance: