Spanish Sentence Structure - Some Basics

Creating a sentence in Spanish is rather similar to creating a sentence in English.

If you know English grammar then you should do fine with Spanish sentence structure.

However, there may be some differences that you should be aware of, so it is not a bad

idea to go over the basics when you are first learning Spanish.

 

Basic Sentence Structure

 

The basic sentence consists of a subject and a verb. The subject comes before the

verb. This simple set up would look like this in English:

 

John ran.

 

John is the subject and ran is the verb. The subject is the person, place or thing

that is doing the action of the verb. The verb is the action that the subject is

doing.

 

Of course, there is usually more to a sentence. The sentence above uses a verb in the

present tense. Some people may be confused when a verb is conjugate into different

forms. For example, if John is running right now the verb would become “is running”.

To make it simpler to understand you should remember that a simple sentence is the

subject followed by the conjugated verb.

 

Sentences with Objects

 

There are other parts to a sentence, such as objects. Many sentences will have

objects in them. In a sentence with an object the sentence order would be the

subject, followed by the verb, followed by the object. With an object our example

sentence would look like this:

 

John ran home.

 

“Home” is the object of this sentence. As you can see, the basic sentence structure

in English is the same as the basic sentence structure in Spanish, so that makes it

rather simple to remember.

 

Differences in Sentence Structure

 

In Spanish there will be some times when the sentence structure differs from English

sentence structure. The most common example of this is with the use of adjectives.

Here is an example in English and then in Spanish:

 

The red book is mine.
El Libro rojo es mio.

 

In English the adjective comes before the noun it is describing. In Spanish, the

adjective comes after in this sentence. The Spanish word for red, “rojo” comes after

the word for book, “libro”.

 

Another situation where sentence structure differs is when making a sentence negative.

In English this is done by adding in a verb and the word not. For example:

 

I want. = I do not want.

 

In Spanish, negative sentences aremade by simply adding in the word “no” before the

verb. For example:

 

Yo quiero. = Yo no quiero.

 

In this case, Spanish sentence structure is a little easier than English sentence

structure. You only need to add one simple word instead of having to conjugate a verb

and add it plus the word “not” into the sentence. This doesn’t even touch on the fact

that in English we most often make negative sentence be using contractions, like

“don’t” instead of “ do not”.

 

You will gradually learn Spanish sentence structure as you learn common phrases, but

knowing that in many cases, English and Spanish sentence structure is similar can be

helpful. It is also helpful that in some cases Spanish sentence structure is not as

complex as English sentence structure.

 

 

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