Ella es ...

After talking about he, let's talk about she.

Ella (She) es (is) ... (click on the link for sound)

So you can say

Ella es una niña (She is a girl).

Él es ...

We talked about 'you', how about a third person?

Él (He) es (is) ... (click on the link for sound)

So you can say

Él es un hombre (He is a man).

Of course, gender need to match, it would be crazy to say, or that maybe fine but I don't know?

Él es una mujer (He is a woman) ... what?

Usted es ...

Last time we talk about Tú eres as an informal way of addressing you. Now we learn something different.

Usted (You, formal) es (are) ... (click on the link for sound)

So you can say

Usted es un hombre (You are a man).

Tú eres

Last time we talked about yo, it is all about me, now let's talk about you

Tú (you, informal) eres (are) ...

Like it or not, there are many ways to talk about you in Spanish. T is an informal way of addressing 'you'.

So if you wanted to say "You are a man", you would say

Tú eres un hombre

Yo soy ...

All the words involved so far in the Duolingo lesson one does not form a full sentence. Today we add these words in front of it to complete the sentence

Yo (I) soy (am) ... (click on the link for sound)

So if I wanted to say I am a man, I would say

Yo soy un hombre

Similarily, if I wanted to say I am a girl, I would say

Yo soy una niña

This concludes lesson 1 on Duolingo

una

So un niña is wrong, so how do we say about it?

una (a) niña (girl)

of course, you can also say "una mujer".

un

Just like in English we have "a" and "the", in Spanish

un is an indefinite article, meaning "a", for masculine nouns (click on the link for sound)

You can use it with the words we have already learn

un hombre (a man)
un niño (a boy)

un can only be used with masculine nouns, so un niña is not correct, because niña is feminine.

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la niña

The girl

la (The) niña (girl) (click on the link for sound)

Notice the similarilty between the boy (niño) and the girl (nina)? Yes, it is often the case that male and female only differs in the last alphabet, switching from 'o' to 'a'.

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el niño

The boy

el (The) niño (boy) (click on the link for sound)

Note that we use el again, of course, a boy is male, and also be careful with the accent mark.

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la mujer

This time we talk about woman.

La (The) mujer (woman) (click on the link for sound)

Note we said El hombre and La mujer. El is the "the" for masculine noun, and La is the "the" for feminine noun. In Spanish, we often need to use different words for different gender.

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el hombre

After learning a few phrases that we can use the greet people, I noticed busuu is now charging for doing the exercises. I didn't plan to pay for it, so I found something else, duolingo.

Duolingo has a different approach, it teaches word-by-word instead of sentences, and it gives sentences example from time to time. In fact,I spent only about a week with busuu and have spent my time mostly on Duolingo.

Without further ado, let's get started to our first word on Duolingo

el (The) hombre (man) (click on the link for sound)

The man, simple as that.

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Tengo ... años

After asking the question, we should reply it!

Tengo (I have)... años (years) (click on the link for sound)

This is also simple, isn't it? Let's learn some grammar here. Do you notice 'Tengo' and 'Tienes' look similar? They mean the same too. Actually they are the variation of the same word.

I have is 'Tengo'.
You have is 'Tienes'

So verbs actually changes when the subject change, just like in English you add 's' when the subject is he/she/it. But Spanish is way more complicated than that, as we will see there will be more variations.

Well, I am 36 this year, but how do I say that in Spanish?

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¿Cuántos años tienes?

How old are you?

¿Cuántos (How many) años (years) tienes (you have)? (click on the link for sound)

If you ask this 'literally' in Chinese of English, this would be really impolite. It is would be asking how many more years you are going to live, but this is Spanish, this is simply asking how old are you.

Note the inverted question mark at the beginning of the question. It is an open question mark, it marks the starting of a question.

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Soy de ...

After asking people where do they come from, should you go answer it?

Soy ([I] am) de (from) ... (click on the link for sound)

This one is easy, but where do you come from?

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De dónde eres?

Where do you from, a typical question that one would ask after meeting a new friend

De (of) dónde (where) eres ([you] are)? (click on the link for sound)

Another strange way of ordering words. Why do we put the preposition 'of' as the first word in the sentence? I don't know, that's the way it is. Let's ask again.

The reply was simple, preposition cannot end a sentence, so we have to put them in front.

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Me llamo ...

After asking what is the other people's name, you would probably here this reply

Me (I) llamo  (call myself) ... (click on the link for sound)

With the help of the friend in discussion forum, this is trivial to understand now. An interesting question here is why we use Me (accusative pronoun) instead of Yo (personal pronoun). A little Googling solved the problem.

Accusative pronoun means it is being acted on.

In English, it would be wrong to say "Me called", but it is fine to say "call me", it is that second "me" thing that is the "Me" in our Spanish sentence, but in Spanish it is put in front.

Same reason applies to the previous post that we used "te" instead of "tú".

Edit: forget about the Accusative pronoun piece, that is wrong. It is a reflexive pronoun, and advanced concept that is too early to mention here yet, see the llamo becomes (call myself)? That's the reflexive part of the word.

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Cómo te llamas?

So you make new friends, you need to ask about his/her name, wouldn't you?

Cómo (How) te (You) llamas (Name call youself)? (click on the link for sound)

Well ... um ... I don't really understand this。Why do we use (How, Cómo) to ask this question which should have been asked using (What, Qué)。

People told me that I should just memorize this. But this is just really strange ...

Edit: After writing this I decided to ask this question in the discussion group. Here is the answer.

llamas actually means (called) , so a more literal translation of the sentence is "How is you called", of course, asking it like this is rather awkward in English, I guess, similarly, asking the literal translation of "What is your name" in Spanish (as in Qué es tu nombre) would probably be equally awkward there.

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Adiós, hasta pronto

Goodbye, see you soon ... well this is not the last blog. I just want to tell you how to say good bye in Spanish,

Adiós  means good bye，hasta  means until，pronto soon (click on the link for sound)

So we say (good bye) (until) (soon), which basically means see you soon.

This is the first time we see an accent mark。Notice the ó on Adiós has a special mark。That is called an accent mark, let's take a good look at it。

ó

A word with exactly the same letters with different accent marks can means something different, so one must also remember the accent marks when remember the spelling!

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