Describing Nouns Using Spanish Adjectives
Introduction To Adjectives
Like their English counter-parts, Spanish adjectives answer the questions: which?, what kind of?, and how many? Adjectives are used to describe nouns and include groups of words such as colors and numbers. Any time you use Spanish to talk about if you like or dislike something, you will use adjectives. When someone asks you "how was your vacation?", you'll use a number of adjectives to describe the experience.
Whenever you see
Agreement between Noun and Adjective
When you use adjectives in Spanish the adjectives have to agree with the nouns in gender and in number. In other words, plural nouns get plural adjectives. (libros pesados) and singular nouns need to be described by singular adjectives. (un camisa blanca). Feminine nouns need to have feminine adjectives (una camisa blanca) And finally, masculine nouns need to be described by masculine adjectives.
Adjective Gender
Most adjectives can be made into feminine form by replacing the o at the end of the word with an a.
Adjective Number (Plural Adjectives)
Adjectives use the same rules as nouns to form their plurals.
Adjective Word Order
You'll want to always keep in mind that the word order of nouns and adjectives is different from in English. Often, when putting together a sentence in Spanish, the adjective follows the noun it describes. This is the opposite of what native English speakers are accustomed to..
Look at these example sentences:.
The tall man is driving the red car.
El hombre alto esta manejando el carro rojo.
Notice in the above sample sentence that the adjective (b>alto (tall) comes after the word hombre (man) that i describes. And of course, you can clearly see in the English sentence how the word tall comes before the word man that it describes. And in Spanish, notice that the way they say "phone call" is to say "llamada telefonica".
Spanish Adjectives in the Dictionary
Your Spanish dictionary can help you when you're learning Spanish adjectives. Whenever you see the abbreviation adj. after a word that tells you it's an adjective. Also, after the adjective you'll see this , a. This means that this adjective ends in a to make it feminine. (this is usually the case, but sometimes not.). So, let's take an example word from the dictionary, limpio, a. This means that you use limpio for masculine nouns and limpia for feminine nouns.