Using Adjectives

Adjectives, as you may or may not know, are descriptive words that describe a noun. They go before a noun in common English:

I have a shiny quarter.

In Spanish, the adjective goes after the verb 80% of the time. Also, the adjective must agree in gender and number if it ends in either -o or -a, or simply in number if the adjective ends in an ambiguous letter (such as e(alegre) or z(feliz).

Let's suppose we have a little boy. We have un niño. This noun is what we refer to as a singular, masculine noun. Therefore, we need to add a singular masculine adjective to accompany this noun. Let's choose an adjective now to put with this noun. If we want to say "an angry boy", we'll use the singular masculine form of "angry", which is enojado. So we have now

un niño enojado an angry boy

For describing an angry girl, we simply have to change the adjective to a feminine ending. The article will also reflect the change, as well. The adjective will still, however, remain singular:

una niña enojada an angry girl

For the above nouns, if plural, we would just add an "s" to the adjectives (enojados and enojadas, respectively).

Now let's look and see what we should do about an adjective with an ambiguous ending. If the above-mentioned boy was "happy" and we use the adjective alegre, we can't very well change the gender by switching an -o to an -a, or vice versa; in fact the only thing we can do is change the number (singular v. plural). Notice the difference in the following sentences:

unos niños alegres some happy kids
unas niñas alegres some happy kids(girls)

One caveat of ambiguous adjective endings is you sometimes have to change the spelling of the adjective slightly. For example, if we used the word feliz instead of alegre above, to make it plural we need to change the z to a c, as well as add an -es. So we get

unos niños felices some happy kids
unas niñas felices some happy kids(girls)

If no spelling change takes place, then when an adjective has an ending consonant like -r, you just need to add -es to pluralize. Let's express the following:

mi hermano menor my younger brother

Now to pluralize it, we'll say:

mis hermanos menores my younger brothers

This form of the adjective, since it is ambiguous, doesn't reflect gender changes. Note the following:

mis hermanas menores my younger sisters

Remember when I said that 80% of adjectives in Spanish follow the noun? Well, how about the other 20? Basically, if the adjective describing the noun is an inherent quality of the noun, then we have the option to put the adjective before the noun. The adjective must still agree with the noun's number, and if possible, the gender:

las rojas fresas the red strawberries
el caluroso sol the hot sun

Sigue estudiando,
Professor Joel