Demonstrative Adjectives in Spanish

Sounds pretty ominous - perhaps those anarchistic adjectives and are marching to occupy the college president's office right now.

Aactually this is a little lesson I lifted from a past issue of "Think Spanish" magazine (febrero, 2007) that was at the bottom of my bedside reading pile.

Demonstrative adjectives help identify or distinguish a noun from others of the same type. They often place the noun spatially in relationship to other nouns sort of sounds complex, doesn't it? In general, they precede the noun. What are these words? In English they are: this, these, that and those.

In Spanish, we end up with three times as many; we not only have to remember the singular and plural, but masculine and femine versions as well, plus Spanish makes an additional subtle distinction with "that and those" - we have those (esos,esa) that are further than these (estos, estas) but we also have another set of those (aquellos, aquellas) that are even farther away, e.g. those way over there or those way back when. Confused yet? I was for a long tme.


A little rhyme helped me to recall the right ones to use:

In Spanish "this (este/esta)" and "these (estos/estas)" have "T's".