Gerald's Spanish Language Blog October 2006 Archive

Today in the United States is Halloween, the day for all things scary — but no matter where you live, chances are there are people or things you fear. To ... Read More

A fair number of verbs in Spanish can be used reflexively with some change in meaning. For example, ir typically means "to go," while the reflexive form, irse, often means ... Read More

Spanish often uses endings such as -ito, -ita and -illo to indicate that something is small. For example, you might think of a libro as a house but a librito ... Read More

Even the best of us can get caught occasionally using a false friend — a word from a foreign language that looks like it might mean one thing but actually ... Read More

One of the things that makes it easy to get started learning Spanish is that a word's pronunciation can almost always be determined by the way it is spelled. In ... Read More

Auxiliary verbs are also known as helping verbs. They are used more in English than in Spanish. Here's why...

Sometimes only the exact amount will do, but in everyday speech we often speak using approximations. In Spanish, there are about half a dozen common ways of expressing approximation. Learn ... Read More

Although we often think of hacer as meaning "to make" or "to do," it has dozens of meanings that can vary with the context. Examples include its use in expressions ... Read More

Prepositions are probably the most difficult part of speech to learn, since they can have a variety of meanings that don't seem related to each other. Sobre, a common Spanish ... Read More

Haber is the only Spanish verb whose conjugation can vary depending on its meaning in a sentence. When used as an auxiliary verb (as in han salido, they have left) ... Read More

El, la, los and las are the definite articles of Spanish and are thus the equivlanet of the English "the." As such, you'd expect to find them used frequently — ... Read More

Only a few words are classified as articles. But they're among the words that are used the most often. (In fact, three have been used so far in this paragraph.) ... Read More

When you see the abbreviation Vd. used for usted, you might guess it has something to do with U being one of the newest letters of the Latin alphabet (which ... Read More

Spanish is the No. 4 language of the World Wide Web, a new study says. The study, La difusión del español en internet, published by the Caja Burgos Foundation, said the ... Read More

One way to expand the vocabulary you already have is through the use of prefixes, those word beginnings that you can use to transform a word such as conocer (to ... Read More