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The most basic is the difference between tú (vos in areas with voseo) and usted: tú or vos is the "familiar" form, and usted, derived from the third-person form "your grace" (vuestra merced), is the "polite" form. The appropriate usage of those forms is fundamental to interpersonal communication.
Note: Usted and ustedes are grammatically third person even though they are functionally second person (they express you / you all). See Spanish personal pronouns for more information and the regional variation of pronoun use.
The formal second-person pronouns (usted, ustedes) take third-person verb forms. The second-person familiar plural is expressed in most of Spain with the pronoun vosotros and its characteristic verb forms (e.g., coméis 'you eat'), while in Latin American Spanish it merges with the formal second-person plural (e.g., ustedes comen).
The pronouns yo, tú, vos, [1] él, nosotros, vosotros [2] and ellos are used to symbolise the three persons and two numbers. Note, however, that Spanish is a pro-drop language , and so it is the norm to omit subject pronouns when not needed for contrast or emphasis.
su casa de ustedes = "your house" (lit. "your house of you" (more than one possessor)) Note the following: There is no distinction according to the number (or gender) of possessors for the third person possessives (i.e. between "his/her/its" and "their"). The possessive for usted and ustedes is su(s) as for other third
This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros, while a Latin American Spanish speaker will use ustedes. Although ustedes is semantically a second-person form, it is treated grammatically as a third-person plural form because it originates from the term vuestras mercedes ('your [pl.] mercies,' sing. vuestra merced).
Ustedes takes a grammatically third person plural verb. Usted is particularly used in Costa Rica between strangers, with foreign people and used by the vast majority of the population in Alajuela and rural areas of the country. As an example, see the conjugation table for the verb amar in the present tense, indicative mode:
The difference between the preterite and the imperfect (and in certain cases, the perfect) is often hard to grasp for English speakers. English has just one past-tense form, which can have aspect added to it by auxiliary verbs, but not in ways that reliably correspond to what occurs in Spanish.