Intentar means "to intend," and probar means "to probe," right? Not really. Intentar has to do with more than intentions, and while probar can mean "to probe" or "to prove," it has other, more common meanings as well. Among them is "to try," a common English verb that can also be translated in several other ways. As usual, as explained in our new lesson on verbs for "to try," your word choice in translation will depend on context and meaning.

If you need to say "this" or "that" as a pronoun in Spanish, you'll need to know whether the noun it refers to is masculine or feminine. Like the demonstrative adjectives to which they're almost identical, the demonstrative pronouns vary according to number and gender.

Most of the words we think of as pronouns — words such as "she" and "that" in English, ella and ese in Spanish — refer to a particular person or thing (or more than one). But that's not always true, as our updated lesson on indefinite pronouns shows. Words like qualquiera (anyone) and algo (something) are usually pronouns too, even though they don't refer to any particular person or thing.

Although ser and estar both mean "to be," to the native Spanish speaker they don't mean the same thing. As a result, at least for those who start out knowing English, some adjectives can change in meaning depending on whether they're used with ser or estar, as explained in our new lesson on using adjectives with ser and estar.