Basic Spanish

Question

My question is how do you properly place words in a sentence. Because I know the way you say it in Spanish is not how you would say it in English. My friend said the verb comes before the noun.

Answer 1

El hombre corre. = The man runs. Noun followed by verb.

In English we use adjective followed by noun.

The red ball.

In Spanish the noun is followed by the adjective.

La bola roja.

Actually the adjective precedes or follows the noun depending on what type of adjective it is and context. - 0074b507, May 25, 2010

Thank you, I am still working on the basics. - 00a52084, May 25, 2010

Answer 2

If you're interested in an "intellectual" analysis of the situation in Spanish sentence-building, you can read this article I found at About.com:

http://spanish.about.com/od/sentencestructure/a/sentenceorder.htm

It seems that you can put the verb or noun first but one way is more common and different constructions have different connotations.

Hope this is helpful!

Thanks for the link - 00a52084, May 25, 2010

Answer 3

This is a vast simplification but I will attempt to show you the principal difference between a Spanish and an English sentence from a beginners point of view. First let's look at how we form an English sentence. If you have not learned another latin language the principal thing that you will find difficult in Spanish is that the object can come before the verb.

Subject: I

Verb: love

Object: you

In Spanish

Object: Te

Verb: amo

The first thing that you will notice is that it appears that there is no subject. This is because the the subject is contained in the verb in Spanish ("amo = I love") and the subject pronouns are only used when you really want to emphasize the subject. For example if you want to say "I am English" you would say "Soy inglés" You wouldn't normally say "Yo soy inglés"

When I first started learning Spanish one of the most difficult things to get used to was that the object can come before the verb. As you can see in the example in the table The word order for "I love you" would be "you I love" The sooner you get used to this the better.

Generally speaking the word order of an English sentence is more ridgid than a Spanish sentence.

Hope this help.

You might want to add that when there is an explicit subject it may either precede or follow the verb. Subjects following the verb rarely happen in English except in questions. - 0074b507, May 25, 2010