Of course, you know that using a double negative is not grammatically correct in English, but it’s the proper way to express negatives in Spanish. The words “ no” and “ nada” are both negatives, so the literal translations back to English would be “ I don’t want nothing” and “ there is not nothing.” In Spanish, “ no quiero nada,” or “ no hay nada” are the correct translations of the same negative statements. Take the following sentences as examples: “ I don’t want anything” and “ there is nothing.” In English, we have to mix affirmative and negative words to make negative statements. Saying “I don’t want nothing” is grammatically correct in SpanishĪnother one of the biggest differences between English and Spanish is the way you express negatives in Spanish. How does this mysterious extra N sound, you ask? Well, think of how you say the word “ piñata,” which is probably the most common Spanish word we’ve adopted in English that uses the letter eñe.” 6. You’ll even find a separate key for it on Spanish keyboards (which have a completely different layout than their English counterparts, by the way). The “ eñe,” as it’s known in Spanish, naturally comes right after the N in the alphabet. ![]() The culprit is an N with a squiggly accent line called a “ tilde” over it: “ Ñ.” The only difference between the English and Spanish alphabet is that there are 27 letters in the Spanish alphabet. There’s an extra letter in the Spanish alphabet ![]() Photo by 1983 (steal my _ _ art) / Unsplash 5. You also have to modify other parts of the sentence, such as adjectives, depending on what gender the subject is.Īs to the question of who decided that apples are feminine and shoes are masculine, we’ll probably never know. You have to use different forms of “ the” depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine: “ el” or “ la,” respectively. The gender of the noun actually affects different parts of the sentence structure in Spanish. But it’s much more complicated than just the noun itself ending in “ o” (for masculine) or “ a” (for feminine). Whether you took Spanish in high school or you’re teaching yourself Spanish, you probably already knew this one. And don’t get us started on how different Spanish is across Latin America. Sometimes it can feel like Spanish has way more, since there are just so many different ways certain Spanish words can be written (we’re looking at you, verbs). You might find it surprising that there are actually more words in English. The English language, on the other hand, has more than 170,000 words currently in use. Of course, that doesn’t include all the regional variations of the language, each of which have tons of different colloquialisms that aren’t “official” Spanish words. Have you ever wondered how many words are in the Spanish language? Using the dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish as an official guideline, there are about 93,000 Spanish words. To make it even more confusing, the word for billion, “ billón,” is still used in Spanish, except it means what we refer to as a trillion. ![]() Well, in Spanish you say “ mil millones” for the same number, which literally means “ one thousand millions.” In English speaking countries, we grow up learning that 1 billion is a 1 with 9 zeros after it: 1,000,000,000. Sticking with the math theme, here’s another fun one. You can take it one step further and say “ cada ocho dias” when you’re talking about something happening every week. This is definitely a hard one to understand for English speakers, but the easiest way to explain it is that basically you count “today” as the 8th day in Spanish. OK, the week technically still only has 7 days in it, but when Spanish speakers talk about something happening a week from now they say “ en ocho dias,” or “ in eight days.” Keep reading to find out what some of the most interesting ones are! Differences Between the Spanish and English Languages That Every Spanish Learner Needs to Know 1. No matter how far along you are in your journey to becoming bilingual, you’re bound to constantly discover differences between English and Spanish that will leave you scratching your head. Just because you memorize a bunch of vocabulary and grammar doesn’t necessarily mean you can speak the language - far from it! This is particularly true if you’re an English speaker learning Spanish. One of the fun things about learning another language is the way it forces you to look at things differently.
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