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1.10: En contexto- ¿Cuántos libros hay?

  • Page ID
    304699
    • Erica Brown, Alejandra Escudero, María Cristina Montoya, & Elizabeth Small
    • SUNY Oneonta via OER SUNY

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    In this section, we’ll learn about the gender and number of nouns. In Spanish, all nouns have a grammatical gender: masculine or feminine. Note that the grammatical gender of inanimate objects is a convention of language, not an inherent quality of the thing (a table, for instance, is feminine in Spanish, but masculine in Italian and German. It’s totally arbitrary). There are some rules of thumb to guess the gender of an unfamiliar word, but the best strategy is to memorize the gender along with the noun. Learning “computadora” isn’t enough; you need to know “la computadora.” If you’re someone who uses flashcards to memorize vocabulary, you might even consider using color-coded cards to remember noun gender. Once we’ve established the rules of noun gender, we will look at how singular nouns become plural in Spanish.

    Conversación

    Marco Reyes is a new student at the university and he needs to enroll in Professor Rivera’s Spanish class. Read the conversation and answer the questions that follow:

    Marco: Hola, buenos días, Profesora. Me llamo Marco Reyes. Soy un nuevo estudiante en la universidad.
    Profesora Rivera: Bienvenido a la Universidad. Me llamo Graciela Rivera, encantada.
    Marco: Igualmente. ¿Cómo está usted?
    Prof. Rivera: Bien, gracias. ¿Y tú?
    Marco: Más o menos, gracias. Tengo una pregunta, ¿hay espacio en su clase de español?
    Prof. Rivera: Bueno, hay veinticinco estudiantes y solamente hay veinticinco pupitres.
    Marco: Perdón, pero, ¿no hay espacio para un pupitre más?
    Prof. Rivera: Vamos a ver. El salón de clase es muy grande. Hablo con los profesores de español para ver si hay un pupitre en otro salón de clases.
    Marco: Muchas gracias, Profesora Rivera. ¿También, hay un libro para la clase?
    Prof. Rivera: Sí, el libro se llama “¡Hola! Español 1”. También necesitas un diccionario, un cuaderno y unas carpetas para los papeles.
    Marco: OK, ¿necesito una computadora en clase?
    Prof. Rivera: No, no hay computadoras en mi clase.
    Marco: Entiendo, muchas gracias, Profesora. ¿Hay tarea para clase el lunes?
    Prof. Rivera: Sí, por favor, lee las primeras treinta páginas del libro.
    Marco: Necesito el libro. Voy a la librería ahora. ¡Adiós!
    Prof. Rivera: Nos vemos el lunes.
    Actividad \(\PageIndex{A}\)
     
    Click here for the text version of questions

    Preguntas de análisis:

    1. Look at the nouns in bold. How do you know if they are singular or plural?

    2. Look at the plural nouns. How do you think you form a plural noun in Spanish?

    Contributors and Attributions

    • Introduction to ¿Cuántos libros hay?. Authored by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution

    This page titled 1.10: En contexto- ¿Cuántos libros hay? is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Erica Brown, Alejandra Escudero, María Cristina Montoya, & Elizabeth Small (OER SUNY) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.