7 ms·

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; word order is extremely free, but that means that a listener needs to figure out the meaning of a sentence that might have a half dozen different structures; almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.); there are ironclad rules on one hand, but on the other, more exceptions than rules. I am fascinated by the challenge of really learning English grammar for the first time, so that I can try to explain how it works. Spanish, by contrast, is almost a formal mathematical system. There are many rules, but they are actual rules. They are difficult to master, but once you have them, they define the language. The spelling of a word tells you exactly how to pronounce it. The rules demand to be followed. My teachers are on my case for even a minor variation in punctuation, that would be perfectly normal in English. And one must beware of the different vocabularies in neighboring countries, which can get you in trouble. That situation is way worse than the differences between US and UK. The notes in the article were interesting, but I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish. Also, the usage is the same as in English, although the use of simple present for present continuous is common in casual speech, and impossible in English (just because there are rules doesn’t mean people follow them).

flobosg 6y ago
> I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Yes, it seems some grammarians reserve “tense” for conjugations. The same grammarians will say that English has no future tense.
  - flobosg 6y ago
    It depends on how you define a tense. Strictly speaking, English has no morphological future tense, but some tense-aspect combinations are commonly referred to as a “future tense”. In Spanish, unlike «haber», «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in conjugation and therefore the present continuous-ish construction is not treated as a proper tense or tense-aspect pair.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      There is something I’m not getting. If “I am talking” is the present continuous tense, why is «Estoy hablando» not the same tense? They seem to be exactly analogous: a verb for to be, conjugated, followed by the present participle.
      - flobosg 6y ago
        I’m not a linguist, but here’s how I see it: They are analogous expressions, but as I mentioned, «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in Spanish conjugation. You only have «haber», while English has “to be”, “to have” and “to do”. So, technically, in English the expression is “conjugated form of auxiliary to be + gerund” while in Spanish it is defined as a paraphrasis composed of “conjugated form of to be + gerund”. Tomayto, tomahto.
        foldr 6y ago
        To be clear, this is just a difference in the traditional grammatical terminology for each language. Linguistically speaking neither English nor Spanish has any such thing as a "present continuous tense". Of course, the exact linguistic notion of "tense" is not particularly relevant to most people learning a language. I'm not objecting to its broader use in the context of language learning.
  - foldr 6y ago
    The reason for saying that English has no future tense goes beyond just morphology. 'Will' is a modal operator that has no inherent future sense. For example, you can say "John will be here already". You can't do that with a true future tense. See e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.h... for more on this. If you try translating the examples at the bottom into a language with a true future tense, then 90% of them will come out as gibberish, or as meaning something quite different.
- Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  Regardless of how linguists classify it, the truth is that there is a direct correspondence in that respect. Every time you can use the present continuous ("I am eating") in English, you can use the Spanish equivalent ("estoy comiendo") in Spanish as well, and vice versa. It's one of the easiest thing to learn for Spanish speakers, contrary to e.g. the present simple which has quite different usage in English than in Spanish. So saying that Spanish has no present continuous might be true in some pedantic or stilted sense of the word or in a technical context, but it's not very useful otherwise. For all practical purposes, for speakers and learners, Spanish has present continuous.
ternaryoperator 6y ago
While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points: In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object. And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.) Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota. I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.
- leephillips 6y ago
  I agree with all this - especially the point about Mexico, etc. I was exaggerating a bit to bring out the contrasts, and as a student and someone learning how to teach the language, these contrasts seem stronger to me than they really are.
- the_gipsy 6y ago
  It's either Mexico and Texas, or Méjico and Tejas. Someone might mix across languages, but that does not mean that there is actually a formal exception to the rule.
  - ternaryoperator 6y ago
    Not at all. In Mexico, it's written México and pronounced Méjico. So that is definitely an exception to the pronunciation of x as a ks sound. The spelling rule you imply is not correct either: the same Spanish speakers who write Texas for the state, write Tejano for the Latin music originating there--both of those spellings being the most widespread in both Texas and Mexico.
iagovar 6y ago
As a Spaniard I agree with your observations. In Spanish most variations of pronunciation come from local variants, so even there there is consistency. In english is quite hard to grasp how to say new words. That's not a problem in Spanish. For me the most difficult is pronunciation, and having so many exceptions.
ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
Thank you for your educated empathy! I spent ten years in the US, have the highest proficiency level in the CEFR standard, and yet I dread phrasal verbs. Sure, I get the feeling the set of idioms I know is getting smaller as time goes on, and spelling is, well, not foreign friendly, to put it mildly. But phrasal verbs... how can I really process that make out is somehow, intuitively, connected to kissing? What about putting out? How can a house burn up but also burn down? Putting off, setting somebody up, giving up? I will always feel more comfortable using postponing, framing and surrendering respectively. (I don't really use them more often to fit in [hey, that one almost makes sense!], but internally most phrasal verbs always feel artificial.) For the record, coming from Spanish I feel the pain of native English speakers having to cope with to be as both ser y estar, but to this day I still have some trouble with do and make.
- leephillips 6y ago
  There is no intuitive way to know that make out has anything to do with kissing, and that was my point: each (idiomatic) phrasal verb is another unique word that must be memorized. They just happen to consist of two (or more!) other words.
CannisterFlux 6y ago
I've lived in Spain for many years and speak pretty good Spanish. But there is one thing I still find relatively tricky in Spanish: the correct gender for nouns. The worst is when you're referring to something elsewhere in a sentence just by lo/la, well away from where the noun was, or have to make the adjective match the gender. If you get it wrong native speakers will not fully understand you or at least look at you weird. For Spanish natives, the "his/her" relationship word when referring to family members can cause problems, since the "his" refers to the other person, whereas su/suya in Spanish refers to the main noun. e.g. "hermana suya" - the "suya" is female because of "hermana" (or "su hermana" the "su" is neutral), whereas in English "his sister" the "his" is male because the other person must be male, the gender of the sister doesn't matter.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Interesting point. Another thing that I recently learned is that a (for example) masculine noun, such as presidente, will take the feminine article if the person you’re talking about is female: la Presidente.
D-Coder 6y ago
> almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.) I knew someone who came to the US from Latvia. His observation was that in English, first you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up.

flobosg 6y ago

> I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.

leephillips 6y ago
Yes, it seems some grammarians reserve “tense” for conjugations. The same grammarians will say that English has no future tense.
- flobosg 6y ago
  It depends on how you define a tense. Strictly speaking, English has no morphological future tense, but some tense-aspect combinations are commonly referred to as a “future tense”. In Spanish, unlike «haber», «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in conjugation and therefore the present continuous-ish construction is not treated as a proper tense or tense-aspect pair.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    There is something I’m not getting. If “I am talking” is the present continuous tense, why is «Estoy hablando» not the same tense? They seem to be exactly analogous: a verb for to be, conjugated, followed by the present participle.
    - flobosg 6y ago
      I’m not a linguist, but here’s how I see it: They are analogous expressions, but as I mentioned, «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in Spanish conjugation. You only have «haber», while English has “to be”, “to have” and “to do”. So, technically, in English the expression is “conjugated form of auxiliary to be + gerund” while in Spanish it is defined as a paraphrasis composed of “conjugated form of to be + gerund”. Tomayto, tomahto.
      - foldr 6y ago
        To be clear, this is just a difference in the traditional grammatical terminology for each language. Linguistically speaking neither English nor Spanish has any such thing as a "present continuous tense". Of course, the exact linguistic notion of "tense" is not particularly relevant to most people learning a language. I'm not objecting to its broader use in the context of language learning.
- foldr 6y ago
  The reason for saying that English has no future tense goes beyond just morphology. 'Will' is a modal operator that has no inherent future sense. For example, you can say "John will be here already". You can't do that with a true future tense. See e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.h... for more on this. If you try translating the examples at the bottom into a language with a true future tense, then 90% of them will come out as gibberish, or as meaning something quite different.
Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
Regardless of how linguists classify it, the truth is that there is a direct correspondence in that respect. Every time you can use the present continuous ("I am eating") in English, you can use the Spanish equivalent ("estoy comiendo") in Spanish as well, and vice versa. It's one of the easiest thing to learn for Spanish speakers, contrary to e.g. the present simple which has quite different usage in English than in Spanish. So saying that Spanish has no present continuous might be true in some pedantic or stilted sense of the word or in a technical context, but it's not very useful otherwise. For all practical purposes, for speakers and learners, Spanish has present continuous.

ternaryoperator 6y ago

While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points: In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object. And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.) Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota. I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.

leephillips 6y ago
I agree with all this - especially the point about Mexico, etc. I was exaggerating a bit to bring out the contrasts, and as a student and someone learning how to teach the language, these contrasts seem stronger to me than they really are.
the_gipsy 6y ago
It's either Mexico and Texas, or Méjico and Tejas. Someone might mix across languages, but that does not mean that there is actually a formal exception to the rule.
- ternaryoperator 6y ago
  Not at all. In Mexico, it's written México and pronounced Méjico. So that is definitely an exception to the pronunciation of x as a ks sound. The spelling rule you imply is not correct either: the same Spanish speakers who write Texas for the state, write Tejano for the Latin music originating there--both of those spellings being the most widespread in both Texas and Mexico.

iagovar 6y ago

As a Spaniard I agree with your observations. In Spanish most variations of pronunciation come from local variants, so even there there is consistency. In english is quite hard to grasp how to say new words. That's not a problem in Spanish. For me the most difficult is pronunciation, and having so many exceptions.

ezequiel-garzon 6y ago

Thank you for your educated empathy! I spent ten years in the US, have the highest proficiency level in the CEFR standard, and yet I dread phrasal verbs. Sure, I get the feeling the set of idioms I know is getting smaller as time goes on, and spelling is, well, not foreign friendly, to put it mildly. But phrasal verbs... how can I really process that make out is somehow, intuitively, connected to kissing? What about putting out? How can a house burn up but also burn down? Putting off, setting somebody up, giving up? I will always feel more comfortable using postponing, framing and surrendering respectively. (I don't really use them more often to fit in [hey, that one almost makes sense!], but internally most phrasal verbs always feel artificial.) For the record, coming from Spanish I feel the pain of native English speakers having to cope with to be as both ser y estar, but to this day I still have some trouble with do and make.

leephillips 6y ago
There is no intuitive way to know that make out has anything to do with kissing, and that was my point: each (idiomatic) phrasal verb is another unique word that must be memorized. They just happen to consist of two (or more!) other words.

CannisterFlux 6y ago

I've lived in Spain for many years and speak pretty good Spanish. But there is one thing I still find relatively tricky in Spanish: the correct gender for nouns. The worst is when you're referring to something elsewhere in a sentence just by lo/la, well away from where the noun was, or have to make the adjective match the gender. If you get it wrong native speakers will not fully understand you or at least look at you weird. For Spanish natives, the "his/her" relationship word when referring to family members can cause problems, since the "his" refers to the other person, whereas su/suya in Spanish refers to the main noun. e.g. "hermana suya" - the "suya" is female because of "hermana" (or "su hermana" the "su" is neutral), whereas in English "his sister" the "his" is male because the other person must be male, the gender of the sister doesn't matter.

leephillips 6y ago
Interesting point. Another thing that I recently learned is that a (for example) masculine noun, such as presidente, will take the feminine article if the person you’re talking about is female: la Presidente.

D-Coder 6y ago

> almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.) I knew someone who came to the US from Latvia. His observation was that in English, first you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up.