The Everything Spanish Grammar Book: All The Rules You Need To Master Espanol (Everything®) (6 page)

FACT

Following 30, numbers are simply written as phrases: “thirty and one,” “thirty and two,” and so on. All you need to memorize are the numbers divisible by 10:

Here are a few examples of numbers between 30 and 99:

If you want to keep counting, the next number is
cien,
100. Then, numbers continue up to 199 with
ciento
plus the rest of the number
.
Here are a few examples:

QUESTION?

The numbers from 200 to 999 work the same: You start with the hundreds, then add the rest of the number. For example, 348 is
trescientos cuarenta y ocho
.

And don’t forget that when these numbers are used to count nouns, the ending can change to feminine according to rules of agreement. For example:
cuatrocientas casas
(four hundred houses).

The pattern of forming the number by going from hundreds to tens to ones continues the higher you go. For example, 1998 is
mil novecientos noventa y ocho
. Here’s the rest of the vocabulary you might need to keep counting up:

For the Nth Time

Numbers used for counting (one, two, three) or as adjectives (one book, two books, three books) are known as cardinal numbers. But there’s another group of numbers: ordinal numbers. Ordinal numbers don’t deal with quantity—they serve to indicate the order of something: first, second, third, and so on. In English, all ordinal numbers following the first three end with –th, so they are easily recognized. In Spanish, the pattern is only slightly more complicated. You’ll have to memorize the first ten:

Starting with “eleventh,” Spanish switches back to cardinal numbers, so “the eleventh hour” would be translated as
la hora once
.

Practice Makes Perfect

Some of the following words need an accent mark. Add an accent mark where necessary.

1.
cantabamos

2.
dificil

3.
camarones

4.
recomendacion

5.
pontelo

6.
voluntad

Write out the following numbers:

Add the correct ordinal number, spelled out. For example, (3)
coche
would be
el tercer coche.

To check your answers, refer to the answer key in Appendix D.

C
HAPTER
4
About Nouns

A NOUN, OR SUSTANTIVO, is a word that refers to a person, animal, thing, or idea. Nouns can be accompanied by articles (a, an, the) and described by adjectives. A noun may be the subject of the sentence, in which case it takes on the action of the verb, or it can serve as an object or as part of a prepositional phrase.

Divided by Gender

Only a few English nouns have a particular gender: for example, you know that “sister” is feminine and “brother” is masculine. But what about a noun like “cookie”? It doesn’t have a gender.

In Spanish, noun genders work a little differently.
Hermana
is feminine and
hermano
is masculine, so nouns representing people work similarly. However, the difference is that even nouns like “cookie” have a gender (in this case,
galleta
is a feminine noun). All nouns in Spanish can be divided into two groups: feminine and masculine.

This doesn’t mean that people who speak Spanish see cookies as having particularly feminine qualities. The gender of any particular noun has nothing to do with the object itself—it’s a grammatical construction that allows nouns to agree with other parts of speech. So if you see a noun in context, you can figure out whether it’s masculine or feminine by checking the ending of its article or adjective. If these clues aren’t available, you can probably make a guess based on a few rules of thumb presented here.

Check the Ending

The clue to whether a noun is masculine or feminine can be found in its ending. The first rule of thumb is that some masculine nouns end in an –o, and many feminine nouns end in an –a.

One important exception to this rule: Nouns that end with –ma, like
el problema
(problem), are masculine.

ALERT

If the rule of thumb doesn’t apply, check to see if the noun has one the following endings. If it does, the noun is most likely feminine.