Gerald's Spanish Language Blog

"La operación fue perfecta." With those words, which first-year students of Spanish should be able to understand easily, Íngrid Betancourt thanked the Colombian military yesterday for her rescue from rebels. Her story is something that Hollywood probably already has on its drawing board, and you can get plenty of the details, in both text and video, today from El Tiempo of Bogotá. Read more...

It's obvious that Roberto is the Spanish equivalent of Robert, and that María is the equivalent of Mary. But it's less obvious how Diego and James could be related. Even so, there's a connection.

Read the headline of this blog entry out loud, and chances are you'll pronounce the three instances of "intonation" differently. And that difference, mis amigos, is an example of intonation.

Relative pronouns are a type of word that is easier to recognize in a sentence than to define. So here's an example: In the sentence "Did you see the car that I bought?" the relative pronoun is "that." And in the Spanish equivalent, "¿Viste el coche que compré?" the relative pronoun is que. Que is by far the most commonly used relative pronoun in Spanish, often serving as the equivalent of "that," "which" or "who."

Some people learning Spanish seem to do fine until they have to start learning the verb form known as the subjunctive mood. This introduction to the subjunctive mood explains how it is used in Spanish and also gives examples of cases where the mood is used in English.

Atrás and detrás can be easily confused: Similar in sound, both conveying the idea of "behind," the adverbs are sometimes (especially in Latin America) interchangeable. But they also have distinct uses.

Spanish continues to be the No. 3 language on the Internet, according to a report, La Sociedad en Red, presented at a press conference in Madrid under the auspices of Observatorio Nacional de las Telecomunicaciones and the Sociedad de la Información.

According to EcoDiario.es, the study said that use of Spanish has increased on the Internet 300 percent since 2000, and there are 100 million Internet users who speak Spanish.

English, of course, is the No. 1 language in the Internet. Second is Chinese.

The study said that 22 million Spanish citizens have used the Internet and that half the Spanish homes have Internet access, usually with a wideband connection.

It's a question that has come up in e-mail and on our forum: If you're talking about an e-mail address in Spanish, how to you say @? The answer comes from an Arabic word that has been part of Spanish since long before the Internet existed.

Go to just about anywhere that Spanish is spoken, and if you start talking using measurements such as pulgadas (inches) and pies (feet), you very likely won't be understood. Before you head out of the United States, take some time to learn the metric system. Not only is it easy to learn, but it is understood in nearly every country in the world.

It's common knowledge that Spanish is the main language of Spain and of most of Latin America. However, there are a few other countries as well that use Spanish, either in everyday life or as a historical artifact that continues to have a major influence.