Spanish: An Essential Grammar

Este, esta, estos, estas

These are used to identify what is physically near to or is associated with

the speaker:

Estas botas que acabo de These boots that I have just

limpiar. cleaned.

They also signify proximity in terms of time:

Lo voy a ver esta tarde. I am going to see him this

afternoon.

Ese, esa, esos, esas,and aquel, aquella, aquellos, aquellas

Both series of words translate English ‘that’/‘those’. However, Spanish

establishes a distinction, by means of ese and its related forms, between

what is connected with or known by the person being addressed and, by

means of the aquelseries, what is distant both from the speaker and the

listener. Therefore, esecan signify ‘that near you’ or ‘associated with you’,

whereas aqueltends to identify ‘that distant from us both’ or ‘not associ-

ated with either of us’.

In practice, there may not always be such a clear-cut distinction in normal

usage, and native speakers may alternate between the two forms, except in

situations where the deliberate intention is to stress distance by the use of

aquel:

ese pueblo donde estás that village where you are

El documento está en aquel The document is in that archive

archivo en Madrid. in Madrid.

These two series of words make a similar distinction between a relatively

recent past and one more distant:

esos días que pasamos juntos el verano pasado

those days we spent together last summer

En aquellos tiempos no existían armas de fuego.

In those days firearms did not exist.

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Demonstra-
tive adjectives
and pronouns

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