Quantifiers: mucho, poco, demasiado agree or freeze

Quantifiers at a glance

The whole page on one screen. A coloured ending agrees; a boxed word never changes.

The mucho family also lines up from nothing to too much:

Agree or freeze: mucho, poco, demasiado

One question decides the form: what does the word describe? A noun: it agrees in gender and number, like any adjective. A verb or an adjective: it never changes.

Watch the same word do both jobs in one sentence:

• Hay mucha gente, pero no hablan mucho. - There are a lot of people, but they don't talk much.
• Tenemos demasiados problemas y demasiado poco tiempo. - We have too many problems and too little time.

The classic error is agreeing the frozen one: "es demasiada tarde". Tarde is not a noun here, so the word stays demasiado.

One more case: before más or menos with a noun, mucho still agrees with the noun:

• Había mucha más gente. - There were a lot more people.
• Es mucho más caro. - It's a lot more expensive.

Bastante, tanto and un poco

Three members of the family have a quirk each.

Bastante already ends in -e, so it has no feminine form: bastante dinero, bastante agua. Its plural is bastantes.

Poco and un poco are not the same. Poco is negative (not much); un poco is positive (a little):

• Habla poco. - He/She doesn't say much.
• Habla un poco de inglés. - He/She speaks a bit of English.

The full story of tan and tanto in comparisons is on correlative comparison.