sentence structure.
how would you make a sentence in spanish? what goes first, the suject or the noun'
2 Answers
Tat In Spanish the subject is often part of the verb. Example hablo from the verb Hablar The "o" in hablo means "I" so hablo means I speak so "Hablo español" means "I speak Spanish" so the I is the subject and comes first in English but you may not see the "Yo" in the Spanish sentence. OK'
The subject is always a noun (or a pronoun). You probably mean subject and object. Spanish is more flexible than English in the order of the words, and often we can shuffle words around without any problem. For example, in English, if you say John loves Anna, you cannot change the order of the words, or the meaning will change (Anna loves John is not the same), or the sentence will be Yoda-like (e.g. John Anna loves). In Spanish you can alter the order if you want.
In general, the part of the sentence that we want to stress the most, comes first. If you are talking about something someone does, you probably want to start with that person, and omit it if it is a personal pronoun. Many verbs refer to things things over which you have no control, i.e. things that affect you rather than you doing them. With these verbs, the grammatical subject is the thought or the thing that affects you, and the indirect object indicates who gets affected. In these cases, the indirect object, the person affected, often comes first, as this person is normally the main focus. E.g.
Me gusta el chocolate.
The "me" is the indirect object (meaning "to me"), the verb "gustar", meaning "to be pleasing" ("to like", if you want a more natural sounding translation), and then the subject, "el chocolate", which is what is pleasing... to me, the one "affected" by the flavour of chocolate. To like is not something that you do voluntarily or that you can control (you don't say "I haven't decided whether I am going to like it"). If you want to focus more on the chocolate than yourself, then you can invert the order:
Ese chocolate me gusta muchísimo.
