Your Essential Guide to Spanish Grammar: Starting from Scratch

Spanish grammar basics for beginners can be summarized in the following simple points:

• Spanish is a Romance language with gendered nouns, meaning each noun is either masculine or feminine.
• Articles and adjectives must agree with the gender and number (singular or plural) of the noun they describe.
• Verbs conjugate to reflect the subject, tense (present, past, future), and mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative).
• Sentence structure generally follows Subject-Verb-Object order, but it can be flexible.
• Pronouns (subject, direct object, indirect object) change depending on the person (I, you, he/she, we, they).
• Basic sentence elements include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions.

This framework provides a foundation for learning more complex details in Spanish grammar and for building simple sentences. If desired, each of these points can be expanded with examples and more explanation for better beginner understanding.

References

• Latin American Spanish: A Complete Course for Beginners

• Learning Spanish Today

• Applied arguments in Spanish inchoative middle constructions

• A Fork in the Road: Grammatical Gender Assignment to Nouns in Spanish Dialects

• The Grammaticalization of the Spanish Construction lo que pasa es que: From Lexical Reference to Subjectification

• Spanish prepositions and silent PLACE

• Evidence-Based Design Principles for Spanish Pronunciation Teaching

• Compounds and multi-word expressions in Spanish

• A categorial grammar of Spanish auxiliary chains

• The Syntax-Prosody Interface: Catalan interrogative sentences headed by que

• Qualia Structure in Spanish Prepositional Verbs: When the verb resorts to a preposition

• Después de usted: Variation and Change in a Spanish Tripartite Politeness System

• A Formal Approach to Spanish ‘Genitive’ Pronouns in Non-Nominal Domains

• ¿Va primero el verbo? OR ¿El sujeto va primero?: Subject-verb order in Latin American Spanish

• Disorder of Spanish Verbs Usage in the Production of Grammatical Sentences Based on Pictures

• Adapting SimpleNLG to Spanish

• Inferential Interrogatives with qué in Spanish

• A note on the silent GO that underlies an instance of apparent suppletion in Spanish