English Sentences In Spanish Essay

To construct sentences in Spanish, you need at least a subject and a verb. Like English sentences, it is quite common to construct sentences in Spanish using the word order subject + verb + other parts of a sentence.

For example:

English: Maria works in a laboratory.

Spanish: Maria trabaja en un laboratorio.

Word order in Spanish, however, is more flexible than English. The order in which the words appear may shift to emphasize one grammatical element over the other. Different parts of a sentence can be arranged in several ways and still be able to express the same idea. The above example can be re-arranged as follows:

Trabaja Maria en un laboratorio.

En un laboratorio trabaja Maria.

Trabaja en un laboratorio Maria.

In addition, when the subject of the sentence

We watch movies on weekends.

Arturo nada. Juega tenis también.

Arturo swims. He plays tennis, too.

In forming Spanish sentences, an English speaker commonly has to deal with the fact that adjectives generally come after the noun. For instance, to express “long lashes” in Spanish, you’ll say “pestañas largas”, or literally, lashes long. That is just, however, a simple twist when you have to consider that an adjective has to change its form to agree with the noun.

Declarative sentences commonly follow the order subject + predicate + object.

Example: Martha da limosna a los pobres. Martha gives alms to the poor.

However, when an object is replaced by an object pronoun (me,te, se, os), the object pronoun is placed before the verb.

Example: Martha les da limosna. Martha gives them alms.

When a sentence contains both direct and indirect object, the direct object generally takes precedence over the indirect object.

Example: Ricardo ha enseñado la técnica a sus alumnus.

Ricardo has taught the technique to his students.

However, if the direct object is accompanied by a supplement, the indirect object is placed before the direct object.