Kilo Lingo

Spanish · Chapter 6 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer

Word order

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

Starting every sentence with yo reads as foreign

The verb ending already carries the person, so the subject pronoun is structurally redundant and normally dropped. Leading with yo every time reads the way 'I I I I' would read in English. It comes back for exactly three reasons: contrast, emphasis, and third-person ambiguity, where él, ella and usted share one verb form.

Veo a María.

I see Maria.

Un gran hombre is not un hombre grande

Adjectives go after the noun by default, as in la casa blanca, but a small set changes meaning depending on which side of the noun it sits. Un gran hombre is a great man; un hombre grande is a big one. Un viejo amigo is a long-standing friend; un amigo viejo is an elderly one. These are semantic choices, not stylistic ones.

un gran hombre

a great man

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

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Practice

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20-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.

Lesson 7 of 13 in this chapter

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