Speed Up Your Spanish

Strategies to Avoid Common Errors

Javier Muñoz-Basols, Marianne David, Olga Núñez Piñeiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135232207
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

'Excellent book. The chapters put together and systematise a lot of material that is often taught in an anecdotal or haphazard sort of way, if at all. Students will learn a great deal from the book and have their confidence in using Spanish considerably boosted as a result.' – Jonathan Thacker, Merton College, University of Oxford, UK

'An invaluable, highly original and methodically sound approach to correcting and eliminating common, yet difficult-to-eliminate errors.' – Manuel Delgado, Bucknell University, USA

'The user-friendly format and page layout makes Speed Up Your Spanish a highly practical reference source for students and teachers.'– Ma Victoria García Serrano, University of Pennsylvania, USA

False friends, idiomatic expressions, gender and capitalization are just some of the areas that cause confusion for students of Spanish. Learning how to avoid the common errors that arise repeatedly in these areas is an essential step for successful language learning.

Speed Up Your Spanish is a unique and innovative resource that identifies and explains such errors, thereby enabling students of Spanish to learn from their mistakes while enhancing their understanding of the Spanish language.

Each of the nine chapters focuses on a grammatical category where English speakers typically make mistakes in Spanish. Each chapter is divided into sections that classify the concepts and errors into subcategories. Full explanations are provided throughout with clear, comprehensive examples and exercises to help the learner gain an in-depth understanding of Spanish grammar and usage.

Key features:

• carefully selected grammar topics and examples based on the most commonly made errors
• exercises throughout to reinforce learning
• shortcuts and mnemonic devices providing vital learning strategies
• a Companion Website available at www.speedupyourspanish.com providing supplementary exercises as well as audio files.

Suitable both for classroom use or self-study, Speed Up Your Spanish is the ideal resource for all intermediate learners of Spanish wishing to refine their language skills.

Javier Muñoz-Basols is an Instructor in Spanish at the University of Oxford.

Marianne David teaches Spanish at the Trinity School in New York.

Olga Núñez Piñeiro is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Westminster.

1
Gender and number

Gender 2

Gender of inanimate nouns 2

Gender of animate nouns 5

Other important aspects related to the gender of nouns 8

Similar word—different gender—different meaning 11

Same word—different gender—different meaning 20

Number 27

Formation of the plural 27

The aim of this chapter is to teach the correct usage of gender and number so that you can make the proper agreements among the different elements of a sentence. Numerous exceptions are shown, as well as strategies for remembering the gender and number of words that tend to cause problems for English speakers.

Gender

Spanish articles and adjectives agree in gender with the nouns they modify. All nouns, whether animate or inanimate, have gender. While it is logical that humans and animals should be either feminine or masculine, with objects gender is purely an inherent grammatical feature.

Gender of inanimate nouns

1 Most nouns ending in -o are masculine and most nouns ending in -a are feminine:

el cielo, el carro, el suelo

la casa, la silla, la mesa

There are some irregular nouns that end in -o and are feminine:

la dinamo, la foto (or la fotografía), la libido, la mano, la moto (or la motocicleta), la radio (used as a feminine noun in Spain and most of Latin America; however, el radio is also used in some Latin American countries)

Likewise there are also many irregular nouns that end in -a and are masculine:

The list below shows the frequency of the irregularity according to the ending (-ama, -ema, -ima, -oma, -uma). Note that many of these irregular masculine nouns are of Greek origin and also exist in English. While a lot of them are part of medical jargon, many are also of everyday use.

-ama/-ma

el caligrama (calligram), el crucigrama (crossword puzzle), el diagrama (diagram), el drama (drama), el electrocardiograma (electrocardiogram), el epigrama (epigram), el fotograma (in cinema: still or shot), el holograma (hologram), el melodrama (melodrama), el monograma (monogram), el panorama (panorama), el pentagrama (music stave), el pijama (pajamas; also feminine in some Latin American countries), el programa (program), el telegrama (telegram), el carisma (charisma), el cisma (schism), el diafragma (diaphragm), el dogma (dogma), el enigma (enigma), el fantasma (ghost), el karma (karma), el magma (magma), el sintagma (sintagma), el sofisma (sophism), el zeugma (zeugma)

-ema

el dilema (dilemma), el edema (edema), el eccema (eczema), el emblema (emblem), el esquema (diagram, outline), el estema (stem), el...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Gender and number
• 2 Mastering false friends: verbs
• 3 Mastering false friends: nouns
• 4 Mastering false friends: adjectives and adverbs
• 5 Verb pairs and other misused words
• 6 Common verb phrases and idiomatic expressions
• 7 Non-existent words, words with double meanings and other misused expressions
• 8 Accents
• 9 Spelling and punctuation
• Appendix Answer key to exercises
• Bibliography
• Index