Spanish Lesson 1

Okay, I guess I’ll start this off now. Well in my Español class we started off learning greetings and stuff like that. Like hola. Well, we had plenty of stuff to work on. And now I’m going to write these down, and the pronunciation and you’ll take it from there.
1. Hola means Hello.  It is pronounced as oh-lah. Although I would think most people would know what hola is.
2. Adios means good-bye. It is pronounced ah-dee-os. Once again, it is a beginner word and most people probably know it.
3. Como Estas means “How are you?” It is pronounced koh-moe es-tah. The s is silent.
4. Bien means good, mal means bad, and así, así means so, so. These are all simple answers to number three. Pretty easy to remember too. An afterthought, muy means very, so you could say muy bien, or muy mal. I don’t think I’ll have to put up pronunciations for these, but in case I do, leave me a comment, or note.
5. There is buenos días which means good morning. Notice the difference in the dot of the i’s.some words are like that, and that’s just the spelling. It is still an i, it just has an accent over it.
6. There is buenas tardes which means good afternoon. Notice buenos and buenas are different in spelling, it wasn’t a misspelling. This is pronounced bway-nus tar-dess. Not tards.
7. Buenas noches means good night. It is pronounced bway-nus no-chess. As before, it is spelled with an a instead of an o.
8. I would think most people would know gracias, seeing as it is pretty common. In case you don’t it means thank you.
9. Cuantos anos tienes? This means how old are you? Now this is the tricky one. Since I don’t know how to get Spanish grammar on here, I’ll have to explain it. First of all, when you write a question in Spanish, you always start it off with the upside down question mark. Another thing. Since cuantos itself is a real word in Spanish I can’t change the spelling with spell-check. There is one of the little accents over the a in cuantos. And finally, the mark that gives the n a y sound to it goes over the n like in piñata. Of course here it fixes it automatically. Well anyway it looks like that but if you can’t see it completely here it is. ~that’s what it would look like. You don’t want to say anos, because it’s not a very polite term.
10. Tengo ____ anos. This would be the answer to number nine. Your age goes in the blank. For me it would be tengo catorce anos. Catorce is fourteen. And also the mark is over the n here. Here it is again for anyone who might be a little slow to grasping information. ~. That goes over the n in this case, giving it the y sound like in piñata. We’ll get to numbers later. So number ten might be useless unless you know that much.
11. Por favor. It means please. I know favor looks like our word favor. But there is a difference in pronunciation. It sounds like fuh-voor. Once more it means please.
12. Si is yes, while no is still no.
13. Hasta luego is see you later. Hasta by itself is see you. So you could say hasta mañana, meaning se you tomorrow. Notice the mark above the n, this will also give mañana the y sound.

Now I might as well get to numbers, to finish up today’s lesson.i assume you would know 1-10, but just in case, I’ll list that too.
1. uno
2. dos
3. tres
4. cuatro
5. cinco
6. seis
7. siete
8. ocho
9. nueve
10. diez
11. once. This isn’t once like in English. It is pronounced on-say
12. doce.pronounced-doe-say
13. trece tray-say. I assume you understand now with these that catorce will be the same.
14. catorce
15. quince. This one is pronounced as keen-say. No q-u sound to it at all.
16. dieciseis. This is pronounced as dee-es-ee-seis. Likewise with 17, 18, and 19. except without seis, their second digit number goes in place of that. Like siete.
17. diecisiete
18. dieciocho.
19. diecinueve
20. veinte
21. veintiuno. Notice it changes from veinte to veinti
22. veintidos
23. veintitres
24. veinticuatro
25. veinticinco
26. veintiseis
27. veintisiete
28. veintiocho
29. veintinueve
30. treinta
31. treinta y uno. Notice they are separated by y. y means and, and it is pronounced as ee. From 31 to 99, they will be separated like that. And 131-199 231-299, and so on. From here on it will be relatively easy with numbers if you remember the first 31.
40 is cuaranta.
50 is cincuenta
60 is sesenta.
70 is setenta. Don’t get sesenta and setenta mixed up.
80 is ochenta
90is nuventa.
100 is cien.
Ciento catorce y cinco would be 145 cien changes to ciento after it goes over 100.
If you wanted o go several hundreds, you just have to put the first number in front of ciento like tres ciento nuventa y ocho would be 398.]



We wont go any further with numbers. Not yet. There wont be any reason to use thousands, millions, and billions yet, I would think.