Ch 16 · Lesson 23Spanish · Chapter 16 · Lesson 23 · Themed review
La naturaleza
Sun, sea and weather. arrived in chapter 1 and has been waiting fifteen chapters for the rest of the animals.
Practise this lesson
21-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
The weather is something Spanish makes rather than something it is
. It makes cold. , , . Spanish builds the weather with , a verb that otherwise means to do or to make, and there is no satisfying explanation for why.
Then it changes its mind for some of them. Rain and snow get their own verbs: , nieva. Cloud and fog take : . And the state of the sky takes : nublado.
So there are three patterns and no rule connecting them. It is a memorising job, and a short one.
tengo frío is about you
is the weather. is you. is the thing you are touching. Three different sentences, one English word, and swapping them produces something either meaningless or unintentionally funny.
el agua is feminine
is a feminine noun that takes . This is not an exception to gender, it is a rule about sound: a feminine noun beginning with a stressed a takes to stop two a-sounds colliding. - the adjective stays feminine, which is the proof that the noun did too.
, , . Same rule. And in the plural the disguise drops: .
Animals arrive absurdly late
is in the first five hundred words. follows soon after. Everything else in the animal kingdom waits, because a frequency list is a record of what people talk about, and people talk about dogs.
That is the real cost of learning in frequency order: you will discuss economics before you can name a sheep. The compensation is that you can discuss economics.
mar
is usually masculine and sometimes feminine, and the feminine is not archaic. Sailors, poets and coastal speakers say , and it carries affection. is the sea; is the sea you have a relationship with.