As I have mentioned in more than one post, I first studied Español in 1985 at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas.  (Northwest Campus, to be exact.)  As I continue my studies now, 30 years later, I often reckon back to words and grammar principles I learned then and compare them to what I’m learning now online.  There have been a few anomalies I’ve wondered about, including one I’ve been meaning to put to Lupita for comment — the use of the familiar tú and its family of verbs vs. usted and its group.  But that will have to wait until another post.

No More LL

One of the first matters that perplexed me, upon opening up one of the pronunciation lessons in my online course, was that I noticed some letters (characters, I suppose) missing from what I remembered to be the alphabet (hereinafter el alfabeto).  The one that caught my eye — or didn’t catch my eye, to be more accurate — was the LL.  It was gone!  ¡Hay no más!  I then noticed that the RR I remembered learning was also missing.  Why would this be?  I had a few theories.  Read More

¡Hola, Mauricio!  ¡Hola, Amy!

That’s how it all starts in Lesson 1.1 of Rocket Spanish (affiliate link) — a few brief, polite greetings, and then an explanation of how the rest of the course will go.  Starting with the second lesson, I learned that Amy and Mauricio were introduced by a mutual friend, and the conversation that spans several lessons begins with an encantado (enchanted) and a friendly kiss on the cheek.  (All during the course of an introduction.  I knew I liked Latin culture for a reason!)

In the first several lessons, Amy and Mauricio begin walking us through the common, conversational Spanish one might use when visiting a Latin country for the first time.  (Chiefly Amy, since Mauricio speaks only Español.)  In all honesty, some of the conversation confuses me, and I’ll explain why, and perhaps ask Lupita for some clarity, in a later post.

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When I studied Español all those years (decades) ago, I can remember being intrigued by the fact that adjectives often followed nouns, rather than preceding them.  I guess I had actually been exposed to the phenomenon before then.  The song “Una Paloma Blanca”, for example, was popular when I was a boy, and it had not escaped me that it was literally “a dove white”, rather than “a white dove”.  I really hadn’t thought about it much, though, until I began the community college Spanish experience in Fall, 1985.

Seeds of Curiosity

Recently, I was working with Lupita at one of our job sites when I began calling her my pequeña hermana.  But then I remember wondering whether it was supposed to be “pequeña hermana” or “hermana pequeña”.

I pondered that for a while until finally remembering to DuckDuck it (since I never Google) and found the page “Adjectives: Part II” on StudySpanish.com, where I learned that article adjectives and adjectives of quantity precede nouns, whereas descriptive adjectives succeed them.  Simple, right?  But what if I have a list of adjectives?  Read More