Gerald's Spanish Language Blog November 2005 Archive

Why would a popular Christmas carol have a sentence with a word order such as "Nacido el Mesías ha"? What does that word derredor, not listed in my paperback dictionary, ... Read More

If you're U.S. resident celebrating Thanksgiving today but want to work your Spanish too, these lessons may be of interest: Saying thanks: Almost any beginning Spanish student knows that gracias is ... Read More

Spanish ranks No. 3 as the language spoken by Internet users, according to articles this week in the Spanish-language press. It should come as no surprise that English ranks first, ... Read More

Spanish speakers in the United States who don't speak English well have often found movie-going a frustrating experience: Either they struggle to understand the latest films in English, or they ... Read More

Most of the words that English and Spanish have in common come from Latin. Among the exceptions is a word that has been in the news a lot this year: ... Read More

If you've ever read any of the popular Spanish Christmas carols on this site, you may have come across some words you didn't know — in some cases because the ... Read More

English has just one of this type of word, while Spanish has four. Can you guess what it is? Find out...

Because Spanish has both a preterite tense and an imperfect tense, Spanish can use the verb tense to make distinctions about what happened in the past, distinctions that aren't always ... Read More

If Dustin weren't studying Spanish or some other foreign language, he might not hear much about the indicative and subjunctive moods. Can you identify the two moods in the previous ... Read More

The Spanish word acrónimo doesn't have much to do with being acrimonious, but it has plenty to with words such as "laser" in English and sida in Spanish. Both of ... Read More

Students are just beginning Spanish almost always start learning the present indicative tense first. And there's good reason — it's the tense used most often, and under certain circumstances it ... Read More

Spanish and English literally share thousands of words, and they all have stories behind them. One of them is the Spanish word gracia and its English equivalent, "grace." Today we ... Read More

One of the first things you may have noticed about written Spanish is its use of inverted question marks and exclamation points. But those marks aren't the only punctuation that's ... Read More

De is almost certainly the most common preposition in Spanish. It usually means "of" or "from" and is also used in a wide range of verbal and adjectival phrases. Learn ... Read More

Slivers of history are hidden in the words we use daily. Names of the days of the week in Spanish, for example, are connected with celestial bodies, and the same ... Read More

Would you pay about $30,000 for a week of Spanish instruction? Well, some people do. But is it worth it? A British newspaper writer, Tom Henry, recently had the opportunity ... Read More

A common way of saying that something has to be done is to use the phrase tener que, as in the sentence "Tengo que estudiar," meaning, "I have to study." ... Read More

In a sentence such as "Jacinto fue arrestado" (Jacinto was arrested), is arrestado a verb or an adjective? The answer is both! Arrestado is an example of a past participle, ... Read More

If you know how to make nouns plural in English, you can do the same thing in Spanish much of the time without having to think about it. In today's ... Read More

In general, Spanish is more flexible with its word order than English is. In both languages, a typical statement consists of a noun followed by a verb followed by an ... Read More

The Latin Grammys — the major award show for Spanish- and Portuguese-language music — have done poorly in TV ratings, drawing only 3.3 million viewers last year. So this year, ... Read More

While first-generation Latino immigrants to the United States almost all speak Spanish, by the third generation they almost universally prefer English, a new study indicates. Although the study was performed ... Read More

Today's the start of a new month, and that means we have a new set of words to learn, one day at a time. There's no special theme this month, ... Read More