Comments on: Serious Spanish Learners: Dominate Ser and Estar!

By: mateo

mateo — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:47:53 +0000

The difference between saber/conocer also exists in other langages as well:
French savior/connaí®tre
Italian sapere/conoscere
German kennen/wissen
Gaelic tá fhios agam/tá eolas agam

And at least, spanish only uses one verb to form the past or compund tenses, haber, as opposed to two in other languages (Italian: essere/avere, German: sind/haben, etc.)

Also, I’ve found that prepositions are used almost at random in different romance languages.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:29:16 +0000

Phil, I think you are right about Tonto! And yes, estar for location, unless, perversely, it is a temporary event like a meeting, then you use Ser!

By: phil walker

phil walker — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:48:37 +0000

The most interesting and useful bit for me was the fact that you always use estar for where are places – I’ve always struggled with this one because it doesn’t really make any sense. If you’re at a restaurant and ask where the toilets are, you’d expect that where they are is a permanent characteristic and so you should use ser, you wouldn’t expect them to say they were over there yesterday, but today they’re up there and tomorrow they’ll be over there again!

Also interesting is that tonto means stupid/dimwitted – do you reckon that that old tv series was the Lone Ranger and Stupid? Given a lot of westerns were made in Mexico and how racist people were to the Indians at the time – sort of a tv producers joke???

By: Jonk

Jonk — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:27:24 +0000

@ Leftbanker. How do they survive without it?

By: leftbanker

leftbanker — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:09:59 +0000

Arabic doesn’t have a verb for “to be.” Perhaps Spanish could lend them “ser” or “estar” and make things a lot easier for students of the language.

By: ernesto

ernesto — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:06:38 +0000

@Bill – the word ‘ser’ like the word ‘to be’ is solely auxiliary and cannot be used on its own. We cannot really say ‘he is’ or ‘es’ as a logical self contained sentence. However ‘está’ or ‘he is there’ is possible. Estar is -as luke mentioned- a form of ‘stay’ or ‘stand’ as a true verb on its own. For what I know they have dropped the ‘estar’ as auxiliary verb in Portuguese and only use ‘ser’, so probably in most European languages it is a simplification that came in their evolution.

There are many more ‘two for one’ cases. For example:

para and por, in this case neither is one is ‘for’ as in English
saber and conocer, in this case ‘saber’ matches ‘to know’ because ‘to know’ is a root that also exists in Danish or German but can only be used sinilar to ‘saber’ in Spanish
‘en’ versus ‘in’ and ‘on’, in this case there is only one Spanish preposition for two in English, German or Danish. I would say en = in but I won’t bet on it.

So anywhere, this is a fundamental problem in language learning, especially with languages that do not match closely. I believe it would help students to focus on these issues more deeply because it can help to master the difficulties of language learning better. Especially when they start learning their first foreign language it is something very strange.

By: Jonk

Jonk — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:56:21 +0000

Thanks for this Ben. I have found that when you tackle subjects like this you guys do a really good job of making things clear.

By: leftbanker

leftbanker — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:26:36 +0000

I admire your ambition in attempting to nail down the different connotations of these two Spanish verbs, but I think it would be easier to define the meaning of human existence, or the difference between love and lust. I have come across some rather confusing examples (at least in literature).

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:57:47 +0000

@ernesto – while I agree that ser & estar are not two words for the same thing in the sense that they cannot be used interchangeably, I think it is misleading to say that “ser” is the real word for “to be”. This makes little sense to me, since in English the verb “to be” is used to describe the temporary state of something (estar) as well as the more permanent characteristics of something (ser). You can’t say that one is more real a representation of the the verb “to be” than the other since it depends on the context in which the verb “to be” is being used.

By: luke

luke — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:27:31 +0000

@Carlos
Ok, I should have said the Latin ‘stare’ which means ‘to stand’. ‘Stare’ in modern Italian means ‘to stay’. ‘Stay’ in modern English comes from the Latin. And I’m presuming that ‘estar’ has the same Latin roots as the Italian word ‘stare’.

I studied Latin for years at school but I thought you’d know what I meant. Of course Italy only became a country in the 19th century.