Day 14 of 90
What Spanish has instead of is
English says I am hungry, I am thirty, I am cold. Spanish says I have all three. Once you see that tener owns this whole territory, a dozen phrases arrive at once.
tener
Irregular, and worth the five minutes.
The stem change hits every form except we, and that is true of the whole family of verbs that do this: poder, querer, pensar, dormir. Some grammars call them boot verbs because of the shape the changed forms make when written in a column. Whatever you call it, the we form is the one to check.
States you have rather than are
Eight phrases that all take tener.
These are nouns, not adjectives. hambre is hunger, frío is cold as a thing rather than a quality. That is why they take tener and why you cannot say muy hambre: you would be saying very hunger. The intensifier is mucho, so it is tengo mucha hambre, and mucha is feminine because hambre is.
Age, and obligation
Two more jobs that tener has taken over.
tener que and hay que differ in who is obliged. tengo que ir names me. hay que ir says the going has to happen and does not say by whom, which is how a rule or a general fact is stated. English blurs this with you, as in you have to book ahead, where no particular listener is meant. Spanish keeps the two apart.
There is no single Spanish word for am. Identity is soy, location and state are estoy, age and hunger are tengo, and weather is hace. Four verbs sharing one English word is the largest single obstacle in early Spanish, and the fix is to stop translating from English and start asking which of the four categories the sentence is in.
Carry these forward
Four lines from today that later days assume you know.
Check yourself
Eight questions. Finishing them marks the day done.
Question 1 of 8
I am hungry is
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