Spanish Punctuation

Submitted by Manzanillo Blogger on Saturday, 25 October 20084 Comments

Recently I have been practicing my Spanish by reading aloud to my friends. Quite frequently they stop me and make me repeat a word over and over until I get it right. The reason is usually because I ignore the little accent marks above certain letters (é ó í). Accents are the Achilles’ heel of Spanish to a gringo! To your average English speaker, those accents mean nothing at all. However in Spanish they are more than cute word decorations, they are actually essential to understanding both written and spoken Spanish.

Whenever you see an accent on a vowel it means you give emphasis to that letter. The accent mark can change the whole meaning of a word. For instance el(the) and él(he). At first, just to get used to it as a student, really give that letter a kick so you get in the habit.

Also don’t forget the importance of the other kinds of Spanish punctuation. In a recent issue of Guadalajara Reporter there was an article discussing just this:

In addition to accent marks, Spanish sometimes uses umlauts, called diéresis, in words like güero (blond, fair skinned) and those squiggly lines over the letter “n”, called tildes, in words like mañana. Omissions of these marks can totally change the meaning of the word. Take, for example, the word año (year). Eliminate the tilde, and you’ve got ano (anus), as in: “¿Cuántos anos tienes?” (How many anuses do you have?) Probably not a question you would ever really want to ask someone.

On a final note, when asking a question in Spanish the sentence is framed in question marks ¿Cómo estás? ¡The same goes for exclamation points! Did you know that if there is both a question and an exclamation in the sentence it is OK to use one of the marks at the beginning and the other at the end:
Vi la película la noche pasada. ¡Qué susto! (I saw the movie last night. What a fright!)
¡Qué lástima, estás bien? (What a pity, are you all right?)

So, there you go. You have been warned. Don’t let this scare you, the locals appreciate any attempt you make, even if what you say makes them smile. Keep practicing! You will get it.

p.s. Big thanks to all of you who catch my frequent spelling and Spanish mistakes. As a product of my generation I have a mastery over neither languages.

If you enjoyed reading this article, then you will also enjoy our interview with Bob Mrotek on his tips to learning Spanish.

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4 Comments »

Bob Mrotek said:

¿Oye amigo!

You wrote, “Or murió(he died) and murio(I die)”.

Better take another look. “I die” is “muero”. If you want to say “I died” you would say “morí” but you can’t really say that either because you would be dead

One other picky little inconsequential thing… The squiggly line over the “ñ” is not a tilde. The “ñ” is a separate letter from “n” and the squiggly line is an integral part of the letter “ñ”. The word “tilde” is actually what the accent (´) mark is called.

Don’t be bothered by my picky nature. I can’t help it. Besides that you are doing fine and I enjoy your blog. Keep up the good work

- 25 October 2008 at 4:33 pm

Manzanillo Blogger (author) said:

Thanks Bob! That will teach me to not write a post fast and assume I have command of a language in which a 4 year old could out-debate me.

Thanks for the compliment. I love your blog. I’m learning all sorts of interesting things!

- 25 October 2008 at 9:20 pm

El zorro platiado said:

Some people swear by the Madrigal book. It is a good starting place, but is not Mexican Spanish. I was dutifully making the cards and practicing them. When I proudly showed our Spanish teacher here (una Manzanillense) she corrected half of it as not used in Mexico.

She was teaching us from the book “¿Cómo se dice…?” I found that book to be an excellent resource that starts with the alphabet. (You can find the 7th edition, which is what we used, on Amazaon for about $4 USD.) If you learn the correct pronunciation of the alphabet, and then add the various dipthongs (two-vowel combinations), that seems to go a long ways towards having Spanish that is not half bad.

One very informative session in our class was on the rules for what syllable has the accent when there is no accent over a letter. Very interesting… and very frustrating to master.

Thanks for the information on punctuation differences!

- 25 October 2008 at 10:43 pm

eileen said:

The thing that improved my spelling the most was chatting on MSN with s spell check in Spanish. I swear it helped me to put my accent marks (tildes) in the right place, and now I can actually get the whole esdrújula thing, which had been explained to me endlessly, but which I could not get my brain around. Now it comes second nature (more or less). I applaud any and all efforts to learn or improve ones’ second language, so here’s an aplauso just for you!

- 28 October 2008 at 8:34 pm