The Everything Spanish Grammar Book: All The Rules You Need To Master Espanol (Everything®) (2 page)

Commonly Used Prepositions

A Sign of Excitement

The Case of Double Negatives

Practice Makes Perfect

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16:
Questions and Answers

I Have a Question

Yes, No, or Maybe

Question Words

What Time Is It?

Other Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Makes Perfect

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17:
Building Vocabulary

The Structure of a Spanish Word

Presenting the Prefix

Following with the Suffix

Diminutives and Augmentations

Recognizing Cognates

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18:
Writing in Spanish

Don’t Overcapitalize

The Rules of Punctuation

When in Doubt—Look It Up

Accent Marks, Ñ, and Other Symbols

Composing a Letter

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19:
Spanish in Everyday Life

Physical Characteristics

Family Relations

Back to School

Eating Out

Looking for a Job

Surfing the Web

A
PPENDIX
A: V
ERB
T
ABLES

A
PPENDIX
B: E
NGLISH TO
S
PANISH
G
LOSSARY

A
PPENDIX
C: S
PANISH TO
E
NGLISH
G
LOSSARY

A
PPENDIX
D: A
NSWER
K
EY

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my family—Nonna, Faina, and Leonid Gutin— for all their love and support. To Veronica, thanks for listening and for keeping me company when I couldn’t stand working anymore. And to ShihYan—thanks for being there.

This project couldn’t have happened without Eric Hall, my acquisitions editor, who believed in me and gave me the freedom to make this project what I wanted it to be. And I owe special thanks to Kate McBride, who supported me in this undertaking. A lot of credit for this book also goes to Gina Chaimanis, who masterfully took over this project, and to the rest of the Adams team—Gary Krebs, Laura MacLaughlin, Jamie Wielgus, the production department (Michelle Roy Kelly, thanks for a great layout!), and of course fellow development editors, Karen Jacot and Christina MacDonald.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge all of my Spanish teachers—your hard work made this book possible. I couldn’t have done it without you!

Introduction

SOME PEOPLE REALLY ENJOY STUDYING GRAMMAR, but for most of us, grammar is nothing more than a special torture devised by bored teachers who wish to break down a language into a myriad little rules that must all be followed without question. But is it really all that bad?

Linguists say that there are actually two types of grammar— prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive grammar is a collection of rules about how a language
should
behave. Inflexible rules that the grade school teachers have instilled in us—never end a sentence with a preposition, at all costs avoid using passive verbs, never
ever
break up a compound verb with an adverb—are prescriptive. These rules determine what’s correct and then try to get everyone to follow them.

Prescriptive grammar has its benefits, up to a point. It helps us make writing and formal speaking more uniform by providing a common set of rules that we have all agreed to use. Then it’s up to your grade school English teacher to force you to memorize these rules and put them into practice when you write.

But there’s another kind of grammar out there—descriptive grammar. As its name suggests, descriptive grammar describes how things
are—
how a particular language works and how it may be used. Native speakers of a language have adapted those rules instinctively, without learning them as rules, when they were growing up and learning to speak. But by the time you are in your teens, this won’t come to you automatically. In order to learn a foreign language, you’ll need to learn grammatical rules as rules. Sure, improving your pronunciation and building up your vocabulary is important. But you can’t do anything with these skills unless you also learn the grammar—how all that vocabulary fits together.

There’s a lot to learn in Spanish grammar. Just dealing with verbs requires understanding of the purpose of conjugations and being able to choose one correctly, the difference between subjunctive, indicative, and imperative moods; what are reflexive verbs and when they should be used; and so on. And what about the noun/adjective agreement, a vast array of pronouns to choose from, question words that change in meaning at the drop of an accent mark?

But learning grammar doesn’t have to be boring. As you go through this book, keep in mind that what you’re learning is key to being able to make the Spanish language your own. For each concept you will learn, you’ll get the reasoning for why it works the way it works, how it compares to a similar concept in English, and how you can use it in your own speaking and writing.

This book was meant for a wide variety of audiences. It’s a great supplementary reference tool for students who need extra help outside of Spanish class. It’s also a great idea for those who studied Spanish years ago but are beginning to forget and now would like to brush up on what they learned. Another audience for this book are those who grew up speaking Spanish at home or with friends but never learned Spanish grammar in a classroom setting. This book will give you the grammatical background for a language you know how to speak but maybe aren’t as comfortable as you’d like to be when it comes to reading or writing.

Whatever your reasons for picking up
The Everything
^®
Spanish
Grammar Book,
I hope you enjoy learning more about Spanish grammar and have the opportunity to put it into practice soon. So sit down, learn the concepts, and then go out there and use what you’ve learned. In today’s world, Spanish is everywhere you turn. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth and start speaking. Good luck!

C
HAPTER
1
Welcome to the
World of Spanish

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND the Spanish language and how it works, it is instructive to trace its roots and learn about its origins. Spanish grew and evolved from a spoken dialect that had emerged from a mixture of Latin vernacular and other languages. Over time, the language spread from a small region in Spain known as Castile to cover most of the Iberian Peninsula, and then pushed on to the Americas and Pacific islands like Philippines and Guam. Today, Spanish is the native language of about 350–500 million people, the third most-popular language (following Mandarin Chinese and English).

A Romance Language

Most people are aware that Spanish is a Romance language, but what does this mean? The term has nothing to do with romance and love.
Idiomas romances
are the languages that trace their origins to Latin, the language of Rome.

As you might remember from your ancient history class, in antiquity, Rome had emerged as a powerful city-state that spread throughout Italy and beyond. At its strongest, the Roman Empire controlled a vast territory that encompassed much of Western Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor—its power reaching from the British Isle in the west to the border of Persia in the east.

As the Roman civilization spread, so did the Latin language spoken by the conquerors. Long after the Roman Empire’s collapse, people in what are now France, Spain, Italy, and parts of Switzerland have continued speaking variant forms of Latin. Eventually, these dialects were standardized into modern French, Italian, Spanish, and other Romance languages.

QUESTION?

On the Iberian Peninsula

The history of Spanish follows a similar path. The Roman legions arrived on the Iberian Peninsula (now home to Spain and Portugal) around 200 B.C. The Romans were successful conquerors and colonizers of this region, which they called Hispania. Soon, Hispania became fully incorporated into the Roman Empire. For instance, Seneca (3 B.C.–A.D. 65), who is still revered as a great philosopher and dramatist, was born in Córdoba, Spain. And the region was even home of one of Rome’s emperors, Emperor Trajan (A.D. 53–117), who hailed from Italica, a city in southern Spain.

As a result of colonization, Latin spread all over the Iberian Peninsula. By the time the Roman Empire fell in the early fifth century A.D., Latin was well cemented in the region, both as a spoken language and as the language of writing and the Catholic church.

Under Attack

Following the Roman Empire’s collapse, the region underwent a period of chaos and decline. Attacks from the north came in waves. First the Vandals and then the Visigoths arrived to pillage and conquer, and the Visigoths managed to stay. They converted to Christianity and assimilated, but their Germanic language affected the local dialects. Certain words and pronunciation patterns not found in Latin were absorbed, while others were dropped. For instance, Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain still retains the sound of “th,” which is found in some Germanic languages (including English), but not in other Romance languages or in Latin.

ESSENTIAL

The Islamic Conquest

Less than 300 years after arrival of the Visigoths, Spain was under attack again, this time from the south. In 711, the first group of Moors from North Africa crossed the Gibraltar strait and clashed with the Spanish. Other attacks followed, and in less than 90 years, the Moors controlled most of what is now Spain.

Al Andalus was a thriving region that boasted the best philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, and poets of its time. Although it was primarily Muslim, Christians and Jews were tolerated as well.

The Language of Castile

Had the Moors conquered all of Spain, Al Andalus might still have been around to this day. However, there was one region that they had failed to capture: Asturias. And in Asturias, plans were brewing to recapture Spain from the “infidels.” Little by little, the Christian armies united and gained strength, and the Moorish armies gave way. It took about 900 years for the Christians to recapture Spain— ten times as long as it had taken the Moors. The last Moorish enclave, Granada, finally fell to the Spanish monarchy in 1492. The language of the monarchy, and of the new nation, was Castilian (
castellano),
the ancestor of modern Spanish.