Two good friends - Carmen and Roberto - are meeting:

Carmen: Hola Roberto. ¿Cómo estás?
Roberto: Yo estoy bien, gracias. ¿Y tú?
Carmen: Estoy bien.
Roberto: ¿Qué hay de nuevo?
Carmen: No mucho.
Carmen: Adiós, Roberto.
Roberto: Adiós, hasta mañana.

Audio:

Vocabulary

Example Dialogue 2

Two persons - Señor González and Señora Pérez - are meeting for the first time:

Vocabulary

Exercise: Spanish Exercise Greetings

Grammar: Conjugations

Spanish has six different conjugations, usually equated to the most common personal pronoun that uses that conjugation.

What follows is the conjugation of the verb "cantar", which means "to sing":

Note that there is no correspondence between the conjugation and the person. For example, second person plural vosotros and ustedes have different conjugations: vosotros cantáis, ustedes cantan. While it is more precise to say that ustedes belongs to the 6th conjugation, normally it is said that it has 3rd person plural conjugations.

Grammar: Verbs ser and estar

Spanish has two different words that can be translated with "to be". Ser is used more for more permanent characteristics ("Soy Luis") whereas estar is used for more temporary or changeable conditions ("Estoy bien"). In future lessons we will come back to the uses of ser and estar.

Here we will look at the conjugations in the present indicative.

ser

estar

Ejemplos de los verbos ser y estar (Examples of the Verbs ser and estar)

Note: *This use of estar is the Spanish present progressive which is used for actions in progress.

Exercise: Spanish Exercise verbs ser and estar

Hay

Spanish uses a different verb (haber) to express "there is " and "there are". The form of haber used for this purpose is hay, for both singular "there is" and plural "there are."

Spanish alphabet

Here is the normal Spanish alphabet. However words aren't alphabetized by it. Please read the notes and sections below. (Blue letters are a part of the normal English alphabet.)

The "rr" digraph

Aside from Ch and Ll, "rr" is another common digraph but not considered part of the alphabet by the Spanish Academy.

Acute accents

Spanish uses the ´ (Acute) diacritic mark over vowels to indicate a vocal stress on a word that would normally be stressed on another syllable; Stress is contrastive. For example, the word ánimo is normally stressed on a, meaning "mood, spirit." While animo is stressed on ni meaning "I cheer." And animó is stressed on mó meaning "he cheered."

Additionally the acute mark is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. It's used in various question word or relative pronoun pairs such as cómo & como (how), dónde & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the).

Diaeresis

Spanish also uses the ¨ (diaeresis) diacritic mark over the vowel u to indicate that it is pronounced in places where that vowel would normally be silent. In particular, the u is silent in the letter combinations gue and gui, but in words such as vergüenza ("shame") or pingüino ("penguin"), the u is in fact pronounced, forming a diphthong with the following vowel: [we] and [wi] respectively. it is also used to preserve sound in stem changes and in commands.

Vowel pronunciation

Vowels are pronounced a bit differently in Spanish than they are in English. In Spanish, the vowels A, E, I, O, and U are pronounced "Ah" (Ah! I've got it!), "Ey" (like English A - "Hey!"), "Ee" (like English E - "He is going"), "Oh" (like English O - "Oh, I see."), and "Ooh" (like you got punched in the stomach) respectively. As an exercise, say the vowels repeatedly aloud: Ah, Ey, Ee, Oh, Ooh. Then say a word such as Wikipedia: "Wee kee pay dee ah".