Spanish Grammar Basics: Sentence Components & Verb Structure
Before learning specific grammar structures in Spanish, it is important to begin with the important (yet boring) basics - sentence components. This focuses on how sentences are formed in Spanish and the parts of sentences that you will need to know and understand before moving forward.
This is the very first step of Spanish grammar learning, so it is okay if you feel confused after this post. These terms and grammatical tenses will start to make more sense to you once you learn them in context, piece by piece. For now, this is just an overview of how sentences are structured in Spanish and the types of functions words and sentences can have.
Sentence Components
What even is a sentence? A sentence is a self-contained unit of communication that can be formed with combinations of the following 8 types of words: nouns, verbs, prepositions, articles, adjectives, pronouns, conjunctions, and adverbs. Each of these types of words have specific functions in a sentence:
NOUN: can serve as the subject of a verb, its direct or indirect object, or the object of a preposition. In Spanish, equivalents of nouns (i.e., words or groups of words that can have the same function as nouns) are pronouns, infinitives, and nominalized words or groups of words.
VERB: the grammatical core of a sentence; expresses an action or a state. Its form has to agree with subject, tense, mood, aspect, and voice.
ARTICLE: accompanies and modifies a noun or its equivalent as to specificity.
ADJECTIVE: accompanies and modifies a noun or its equivalent.
ADVERB: modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a whole sentence.
PRONOUN: is used to avoid repeating a noun whose reference is clear.
PREPOSITION: relates a noun or its equivalent to another noun, to the verb, or to the rest of the sentence.
CONJUNCTION: joins two parts of a sentence. Conjunctions of subordination introduce subordinate clauses.
Verb Structure
*The examples for the indicative, conditional, and subjunctive are given in the first-person singular (yo). The example for the imperative is given in the ustedes form.
**Some grammarians consider the conditional to be a tense of the indicative mood, not its own separate mood. Because it used for contexts that are different from those in which the other moods are used, and because it has two tenses itself, here it going to be considered its own mood.















