Word War III: English Vs Spanish

                 ¡Hola y bienvenidos a Guerra de Palabras III: Inglés contra Español! Hay muchas diferencias entre las lenguas de Inglés y Español. ¡Vamos a empezar (pero en Ingles; lo siento por todos que leer este en Español, pero no sé escribir en Español muy bien)!

                Translation: Hello and welcome to Word War III: English vs. Spanish! There are many differences between the languages of English and Spanish. Let’s begin (but in English; I’m sorry for all those who read this in Spanish, but I don’t know how to write in Spanish very well)!

                Depending on your knowledge of the Spanish language, the mini paragraph above may or may not mean much to you. For those that know how to read Spanish and translate it even a little to English, you can tell that there are definitely differences between the two already (beyond the spelling, which we won’t cover here just because differences in spelling should be relatively obvious).

                One of the first things you’ve probably noticed is the punctuation. In English, we only punctuate sentences at the end of the statement or question. In Spanish, though, sentences that are exclamations or questions are punctuated at both the beginning and at the end. Here are some examples:

                “¿Quién es?” (“Who is it?”), or

                “¡Yo te quiero!” (“I love you!”; literally “You I want!”)

            The differences in punctuation aren’t just applicable to words. In Spanish, numbers that are over 3 digits long are separated by a decimal point instead of a comma. For decimals, people of the Spanish language use a comma. These are shown in the examples below.

           

English Writing	Spanish Writing
10,000	10.000
0.0001	0,0001

                There’s also the matter of including accents on appropriate letters in appropriate situations. Some words, such as “matemáticas” (“mathematics”) always have accents on them, while some are more like “quien” (“who”) and only have an accent when placed in a certain spot in a sentence. All of the main question words in Spanish have question marks, but if they can be used outside of a sentence they do not require accents.*

Question Word	English Definition	Word Outside of Question Context
Cuándo	When	Cuando
Qué	What	Que
Dónde	Where	Donde
Cuál	Which	Cual
Quién	Who	Quien

*In the case of “Por qué” (“Why”), the words are combined and the accent on the “e” is removed when not being used as a sentence, forming “Porque” (“Because”).

                 Pronunciation in Spanish is also different from the pronunciation used in English. In English, many letters have different pronunciations, such as “c” which can sound soft as in “secession” or hard as in “cover”. In Spanish, each letter has only one way to be pronounced, so pretty much everything that is said can be written phonetically (though accents may make it difficult to do this all the time for a novice Spanish speaker).

                Now let’s talk about grammar (this is where it can get a little messy. If you have difficulty understanding this, feel free to look this information up on your own. I’m sure there are others who can word it in a way that makes sense to you). Unlike English, Spanish nouns are separated by gender and number. This can get a little tricky, especially because there are four ways just to say the word “the.” If a noun is feminine and singular, the correct term is “la”. If a noun is masculine and singular, use “el” (no accent). If a feminine noun is plural, “las” is the correct word, and if a noun is both masculine and plural, one should use “los”. The problem with multiple ways to say something is common when speaking Spanish (though it is not unique in having this problem considering that English is at least ten times wonkier than any romantic language ever could be), but most native Spanish speakers will understand each other based on context.

                Spanish, as you will soon learn, is all about “agreeing”. This refers to the action of making sure that adjectives match the subject based on gender and number. If a person were to say, “La mujer es bonita” (“The woman is pretty”), their form would be correct. Because the subject is singular, the word for “the” and the adjective must “agree”. The statement “El mujer es bonito” is incorrect based on these same conditions. In addition, if “The green house is big” was to be translated, it is important to remember that the adjective “green” would come after the subject “house” and would look something like this: “La casa verde es grande” (note: adjectives ending in “-e” do not need to be changed to agree with feminine nouns. All adjectives ending in “-o” must be changed to “-a” in order to form a correct sentence).

                Another thing that must be taken into consideration when speaking or writing Spanish are the verbs. In Spanish, verbs in the infinitive form end in either –ar, -er, or –ir (for example, “buscar”, “correr”, and “escribir”). These forms can only be used after another conjugated verb in a sentence. Conjugating verbs can be relatively tricky too, if only because of irregularities in all tenses of speech. In the present tense, there are three main verb charts to remember, provided for you in the charts below. English translations of are shown in parenthesis.

-AR VERBS

Subject	Verb Ending	Subject	Verb Ending
Yo (I)	-o	Nosotros/as (We)	-amos
Tú (You, informal)	-as	Vosotros/as (You all, informal)*	-aís
Ella (She) Ello (He) Usted (You, formal)	-a	Ellas (They, all female) Ellos (They, at least one boy in the group) Ustedes (You all, formal)	-an

*Pretty much used only in Spain

-ER VERBS

Subject	Verb Ending	Subject	Verb Ending
Yo (I)	-o	Nosotros/as (We)	-emos
Tú (you, informal)	-es	Vosotros/as (You all, informal)*	-eís
Ella (She) Ello (He) Usted (You, formal)	-e	Ellas (They, all female) Ellos (They, at least one boy in the group) Ustedes (You all, informal)	-en

*Pretty much used only in Spain

-IR VERBS

Subject	Verb Ending	Subject	Verb Ending
Yo (I)	-o	Nosotros/as (We)	-imos
Tú (You, informal)	-es	Vosotros/as (You all, informal)*	-ímos
Ella (She) Ello (He) Usted (You, formal)	-e	Ellas (They, all female) Ellos (They, at least one boy in the group) Ustedes (You all, formal)	-en

*Used pretty much only in Spain

                Spanish is a pretty complex language, like most other common languages, but it’s a language that thousands of people in this world speak. As with other languages, differences exist between Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico and Spanish spoken in Venezuela. It’s an interesting concept, and while this guide doesn’t take every single difference between English and Spanish into account, it’s definitely a good place to start. ¡Adiós! (Translation: Goodbye!)