Gerald's Spanish Language Blog

One of the more awkward phrases that you'll find in news articles from Spain today (see the blog entry below) is alto el fuego — a phrase derived by translating ... Read More

Phrases such as alto el fuego (cease-fire) and gestos al paz (peace gestures) dominated the headlines in Spain today as the Basque separatist/terrorist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) announced a ... Read More

Except possibly for Venezuela, Bolivia has been the South American country in the news the most recently — the two countries have outspoken left-winger leaders, and both Bolivia's Evo Morales ... Read More

To the casual observer, there isn't much difference in Spanish and English punctuation other than the use of the inverted question mark and exclamation point in Spanish. But there are ... Read More

Among the common mistakes made by beginning Spanish is assuming that the capitalization rules are the same as the ones they're used to. They're not. Most if not all words ... Read More

Just as in English we can create adjectives by adding "-ing" to many verbs, in Spanish it is possible to form adjectives from verbs by using the endings of -ante, ... Read More

I'm not sure what the current edition says, but the several-years-old edition I have of the Guinness recordbook says that superextraordinarísimo is the longest word in Spanish. But is it ... Read More

Once you get beyond the simple past, present and future tenses, you'll soon have a need for participles. Not only do they combine with other verbs to form new tenses, ... Read More

You can't really call conmigo and contigo contractions, because they aren't shorter than the words they replace. But like English words such as "can't," they each stand for a pair ... Read More

If you are fascinated by the human phenomenon of language — and if you can read Spanish — you may want to take a look at a new book, El ... Read More

Tener is one of those verbs you can't do without. Of course, like most of the most commonly used verbs, it is conjugated irregularly. Our revised conjugation page for this ... Read More

No is one of those Spanish words that can be deceptive. You know what it means, because it's the same as the English word. But the word is used in ... Read More

Sometimes it is useful to indicate that we really mean what we say or to otherwise place some added emphasis on a statement. In English, we often do that with ... Read More

The preposition a is only one letter, but it's nevertheless vital. In a grammar rule that has no English equivalent, the short preposition is used before nouns or pronouns when ... Read More

You don't have to have learned much Spanish to known that adjectives must agree with the nouns they refer to in both number and gender. However, there is one notable ... Read More

¿Qué película debe ganar el premio Oscar como mejor película de 2005? Buenas noches y buena suerte Capote Crash Munich Secreto en la montaña ¿Quién debe ganar el premio Oscar como mejor actor de 2005? Philip Seymour ... Read More

The first of the month brings a new collection of words to learn, one for each day. This month, there's no special theme — just words that will come in ... Read More