Estudio Contrastivo Inglés / Español.

Profesor: Matías Juárez.

English and Spanish do have some differences as well as similitudes (you can actually see one difference here
because we don´t add emphasis with auxiliaries in Spanish).

It’s obvious to mention the phonetic aspect. English and Spanish have their own patterns of pronunciation and they
even have their own sounds.

However, we’re going to sum up these features as it follows:

1. English is not a phonetic language, Spanish is.

This is because English has many and countless silent letters and homophones (words with the same
pronunciation). Here are some examples:
-you’re and your are pronounced in the same way but different meaning.
chocolate, comfortable and vegetable are words that can be found in Spanish. However, they are
pronounced quite differently because of silent letter resulting from elision.
2. In English the notion of genre in nouns is almost non-existent.
there is no doubt this is one of the major changes we can appreciate when comparing both languages. In
Spanish, the article denotes the genre of the noun it precedes (for example: la heladera > una heladera; el
auto > un auto). On the contrary, in English we just use “the” or “a/an” in front of the noun without putting
much effort to the genre (the car, a car, the fridge, a fridge).
NOTE: we should be careful with the possessive adjectives (his, her, its, their). They do indicate genre of the
noun and it is highly important for a proper understanding of the situation in general.
3. in English, the adjective goes before the noun. Plus, the adjective is never pluralised.
this is a must rule. Since we started learning English, the first thing we learned about the language was the
order of words. Also, it is important to highlight that we should never pluralise adjectives in eeglish. It does
happen in Spanish but never in English.
Compare:
I like big houses with modern windows.
Me gustan las casas grandes con ventanas modernas.
NOTE: in English, it is quite common to use more than 3 adjectives to describe something but in Spanish is
quite uncommon. See:
-That is a really ugly old white wooden table. (in Spanish it would be a really different sentence).
4. Simple negation versus double negation.
Compare:
I have no problem with that = No tengo ningún problema con eso.
Do you see? In Spanish, it is common to use double negatives meanwhile in English simple negations are
more frequent.
5. Spanish offers more options when it comes to conjugate a verb.
We often think that conjugating a verb is only a matter of checking if it is in the past, present or in the future.
What is more, aspect is considered (simple, continuous or perfect). However, in Spanish we should be
careful with the suffixes more than in English.
Compare:
work, works, worked, working.
trabajo, trabajas, trabaja, trabajamos, trabajan, trabajaron, trabajado, trabajaba… trabajé…
trabajaré…trabajaría…trabajaremos…
6. English and spanish do not share all punctuation rules.
Capital letters are used for months, days, nationalities, and languages in English.
exclamation and question marks do not open, they just close the sentence.
Let’s analise how genre and number is used in both languages and how exceptions create problems for translation:
Let’s practice: