Quote:
Originally Posted by Ebuchan
Yeah, like the title says, I speak English, Spanish and I know basic French (like really basic French) I can help with anything. I know Spanish inside and out because I am Central American. I know a lot of grammar and sentence stucture as well as any other thing you might need. It's pretty similar with English. you can write to me if you need help. I can also proof read really well!  |
Well yes, many Spanish words are similar to English, but that doesn't make them similar. They are a totally different languages. For instance, English does perform some declinations for the four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative) whereas in Spanish all cases are handled through prepositions and articles. The English grammar is, in fact, a simplified version of the German.
Examples:
English: _John's_ car is big
Spanish: El auto de Juan es grande
Use of genitive: the appostrophe after "John" is the way English manages the genitive, whereas in Spanish is managed through the "de" preposition (lit: The car of John is big).
English: I'm talking to _her_
Spanish: Le hablo a ella
Use of accusative: "her" is the accusative for "she", whereas in spanish is the same pronoun ("ella").
Furthermore, English lacks of reflexive verbs and you'll have to use some auxiliary words such as "myself", "yourself", etc, to indicate that the verb is reflected over the pronoun:
English: I'm dressing myself
Spanish: _me_ estoy vistiendo
Spanish: sentarse
English: to sit oneself.
Another example would be that the spanish distinguish between a property inherent to the substantive and a transitive one. For the first, you use the verb "ser" and for the last, the verb "estar". In English both cases uses the verb "to be".
And what about the auxiliary verbs? English rely heavily on their use: do, does, have, will, shall, could, would, etc, whereas in Spanish there are very few cases (i.e. in the perfect past tense, the verb "haber"):
English: I _will_ do my homework
Spanish: Yo haré mi tarea
In this case, the verb "do" does not suffer a grammatical change (instead it uses the auxiliar verb "will"), but in the spanish translation, the verb "hacer" actually changed and no auxiliar verb is used.
Adjectives are another good example. English qualifies a substantive by placing the adjective before it, but the Spanish does so in two ways: by using the preposition "de" ("of") followed by the adjective (when describing a substantive's property or accident), or simply by placing it before or after the substantive (when describing a somewhat subjective attribute):
English: the crystal glass
Spanish: el vaso de cristal
English: the long road
Spanish: el largo camino / el camino largo
And don't get me started on the order that a (sintactically correct) sentence must have. Suffice to say that in English the order of the sentence's part (pronoun, subject, verb, complements, etc) DOES matter and you can change the entire meaning of the sentence by misplacing such parts, whereas in spanish the order (most of the times) does not matter.
English: I walk next to the river.
Spanish: Camino junto al río / Junto al río yo camino / yo, junto al río, camino / Junto al río camino yo
English: "The coffee cup" means a cup made of coffee whereas "The cup of coffee" means a cup that contains coffee in it.
Spanish: "La taza de café" could have both meanings and there's no way to distinguish between both other than the context (and the common sense).
Those were some examples on the differences between both languages. Sure, they share some sounds and words, if only because all the western languages have common latin and greek roots. But that's all about the similarities. Grammars are really different.
Regards,
KK.