Spanish Grammar Guide
Spanish grammar is the foundation of clear, confident communication, whether you are ordering a coffee in Madrid, studying for an exam, or chatting with friends across the Spanish-speaking world. It is also more logical than it first looks: once you learn the core patterns, the same rules repeat across the language.
Spanish is spoken by more than 600 million people and standardised by the Real Academia Española, so the rules you learn hold good from Salamanca to Santiago.
A handful of features do differ from English. Every noun carries a gender, verb endings tell you who is acting so the pronoun can be dropped, and two separate verbs cover "to be".
This guide covers every major Spanish grammar topic with clear explanations, practical examples, and links to deeper reading.
Use the sections below to find what you need, or work through them from the start to build a solid foundation.
Tenses show when an action happens and help us place events in time. Spanish marks this on the verb itself, so the ending changes rather than an auxiliary being added, and it splits the past into two tenses where English uses one.
Explore all Spanish Tenses
- Future tenses: actions that will happen later, including the ir a form used most in speech.
- Past tenses: completed, repeated and unfinished actions before now, and choosing between the preterite and the imperfect.
- Present Tenses: actions happening now or still connected to the present.
- Conditional: what would happen rather than what does or will, plus polite requests.
The parts of speech are the categories that Spanish words fall into, and they define what each word does inside a sentence.
- Ser vs Estar: the two Spanish verbs for "to be" and when to use each.
- Por vs Para: the two prepositions that both translate as "for".
- Nouns and Gender: why every noun is masculine or feminine, and how articles agree with it.
- Subject Pronouns: the words for "I", "you", "he" and the rest, and why Spanish often drops them.
- Spanish Adjectives: agreement in gender and number, and where they sit in the sentence.
- Spanish Reflexive Verbs: verbs where the subject acts on itself, marked by -se.
- Comparative and Superlative: comparing two things, and marking one as the most or least.
Vocabulary is about the words themselves: how they are built, how they connect to one another and how to choose the right one.
- Cognates & false friends: words that look like English and mean the same, and the ones that trap you.
- Suffixes, prefixes & diminutives: how endings and beginnings build new words, including -ito and -ita.
- Common Spanish words: the high-frequency core that covers most everyday conversation.
Grammar conventions are the written rules of Spanish: how it spells, accents, punctuates, and marks the small words in front of nouns. Several of these have no English equivalent.
- Alphabet & Spelling: the 27 letters, the sounds they map to, and why ch and ll no longer count as letters.
- Accents & Punctuation: what the written accent does to stress and meaning, plus the inverted ¿ and ¡.
- Demonstratives: este, ese and aquel, which point to things by distance from the speaker.
- Articles & Determiners: el, la, un, una, and why Spanish uses "the" more often than English.
Sentences and clauses are how Spanish joins ideas together. Word order is looser than in English, and the words that link clauses often decide which verb form follows.
- Conjunctions: the words that join clauses, and which ones trigger the subjunctive.
- Conditional: si sentences and the three main patterns for what would happen.
- Word order & sentence construction: how Spanish arranges subject, verb and object, and how it forms questions and negatives.