Spanish: An Essential Grammar

Decades are probably best referred to in the following manner: los (años) sesenta‘the sixties’. Basic arithmetical calculations ...

Ordinals are adjectives which agree both in number and in gender with the noun to which they refer. Primeroand tercerodrop the - ...

‘average/mean’: media luna‘a half moon’, la temperatura media‘the average temperature’, (iii) as an adverbit means ‘half’: Ella ...

The numeral cientois sometimes used as an alternative to centenar, for example in reference to quantities of money, or in the si ...

The rules governing the way sentences are negated in Spanish are rather different from the equivalent rules in English. For exam ...

Luis no se presentó/No se Luis didn’t turn up. presentó Luis. ¿No te gusta? Don’t you like it? One exception is when nodoes not ...

Nadie ‘no one’, ‘not... anyone’ and nada ‘nothing’, ‘not... anything’ Both of these may precede or follow the verb. Nadais more ...

Notes: 1 Nunca(and not jamás) is used in comparisons: mejor tarde que nunca‘better late than never’. 2 For the strongest negativ ...

Ya no se ve a ningún hombre vestido así. You no longer see any men dressed like that. No encontró ningunos pantalones que le que ...

Expressions using no Expressions using no (a) More emphatic than noalone are: claro que no/desde luego que no/por supuesto que n ...

Spanish negatives with English affirmative meaning In some cases a Spanish negative word will translate an English word that is ...

A relative clause plays a modifying role in a sentence. For example, the sequence ‘who complain’ in the sentence ‘They don’t lik ...

In contrast, a Spanish relative pronoun can neverbe omitted. Therefore, the relative pronoun que, meaning ‘that’, cannot be omit ...

Spanish relative pronouns, adverbs and adjectives An inventory of Spanish relative words is given in Table 25.1: Table 25.1Spani ...

Note also that constructions such as ‘it was John who.. .’ and ‘it was yesterday that.. .’ are not included in the basic system. ...

La chica con quien iba a compartir el piso ha perdido su trabajo. The girl with whom I was going to share the flat has lost her ...

Translating ‘which’ in relative clauses In restrictive relative clauses (a) If ‘which’ is not preceded by a preposition, then qu ...

Han retrasado todos los vuelos, lo que hace pensar que hay un problema grave. They’ve delayed all the flights, which makes you t ...

Como él era del pueblo adonde iba, ofreció llevarme en su furgoneta. As he was from the village I was going to, he offered to ta ...

Relative clauses introduced by cuyoare replaced in informal speech by full clauses introduced by que + possessive adjective: Est ...