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The most obvious differences between Spanish and Portuguese are in pronunciation. Mutual intelligibility is greater between the written languages than between the spoken forms. Compare, for example, the following sentences—roughly equivalent to the English proverb "A word to the wise is sufficient," or, a more literal translation, "To a good ...
Spanish generally uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. However, there are three key differences between English and Spanish adjectives. In Spanish, adjectives usually go after the noun they modify. The exception is when the writer/speaker is being slightly emphatic, or even poetic, about a ...
Because Spanish is a Romance language (which means it evolved from Latin), many of its words are either inherited from Latin or derive from Latin words. Although English is a Germanic language , it, too, incorporates thousands of Latinate words that are related to words in Spanish. [ 3 ]
All varieties of Spanish distinguish between a "single-R" and a "double-R" phoneme. The single-R phoneme corresponds to the letter r written once (except when word-initial or following l, n, or s) and is pronounced as [ɾ], an alveolar flap—like American English tt in better—in virtually all dialects.
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. The subject, if specified, can easily be something other than these pronouns.
Spanish also features the T–V distinction, the pronoun that the speaker uses to address the interlocutor – formally or informally [c] – leading to the increasing number of verb forms. Most verbs have regular conjugation, which can be known from their infinitive form, which may end in -ar , -er , or -ir . [ 11 ]
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis.
In most Iberian Mainland Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Mexican Spanish, there is still a strong distinction between the preterite and the present perfect. The preterite denotes an action that began and ended in the past, while the present perfect denotes an action that began in the past and is over; thus, Comí todo el día. (I ate all day ...