Say “Mom,” “Dad,” & More in Spanish!

Hola amigos, welcome back. Today in our lesson I want to give you words that relate to our families. Now this is going to open up so many conversational possibilities for you because think about it, you can talk about who those people are, you know, mom, dad, sister, brother, you can talk about their age, where they live, you can describe them, bring in those words from a lesson a while back when we talked about describing others. You can talk about all kinds of things and so this is going to be a great lesson for you. So get ready to write, we're going to start out by giving you words that talk about who our family members are, okay? So first of all this word is the family which is la familia, la familia. And we'll start with brother The great thing about this is, is once you get one word down, you've really got both of them, okay? And here's an example, hermano, hermano, that's brother. Well guess how we make it sister? You just put an a at the end, hermana, hermana. So if you have one, you have the other. All right, so that's brother and sister. Now mother is madre, m from mother, and father is padre. Now think about a word in English that we might get from Latin, maternity, paternity, paternal, maternal. Those all come from our Latin influence in English and they come straight from Latin meaning mother, father. And so this is where we get those words. So madre, padre, mother, father. Now if I were going to say parents together, I would use padres, padres, which you know is the father form, but that's how we do collective things when it's men and women together. Now uncle is tío, accent on the i, tío. And aunt is tía. Grandfather, abuelo, and grandmother, abuela. Cousin who is a boy is primo, and who's a girl is prima. I think it's interesting if you think about my first cousin, in a minute we're going to get the word for first, it's primero. And so sometimes people relate those words together and help them to remember cousin because it's almost like saying, you know, you're first, but we'll get that in a minute. Primo and prima. Now your niece and nephew, sobrino and sobrina, sobrino, sobrina. Grandson, granddaughter is nieto and nieta, nieto and nieta. Now I think that gets the basics for words right, for family words right now. Let's go into something a little bit different that we're going to bring into our conversation today and that is possessive adjectives. So we're going to be able to talk about my brother, my sister, his father, things like that. Now possessive adjectives are just that. They show who possesses something, who possesses it. And so we're saying my something, his car, their house. So you're showing who owns that. That's what we're doing right now with these upcoming words right here. Now you may want to draw a chart for this. We'll put our chart up just to give you that visual. Up here on the top left, my, everything that relates to me is in the top left. So we'll put my up there and that's me, M-I, me. So my house, my car, okay. Your, talking to someone I know well, a friend, an acquaintance, is tú. Now notice this does not have an accent in it on top of the you. When we add an accent, when we put an accent on it, it means you. Remember from a lesson quite a while back, it means you instead of your. But we take the accent off, now it means your. Your house, tú casa. Your car, tú carro. All right, now on the bottom left of the chart, we're going to put this word, su, su. Now él, ella, and usted are all going to use the word su. So if I want to say his house, su casa. Her house, su casa. Your house, if I'm speaking respectfully with that usted mind frame, su casa. All those are the same. Now you might be saying, how do I know the difference? If I hear somebody say that, how do I know which one they mean? You're going to know that by the context of the conversation, okay. So you'll get it because you'll, you know, in conversation we do the same thing in English. We know the difference between the three bears in English. Bear, the animal. Bear meaning nothing, nothing on it, and I can't bear to think about it, meaning enduring something. We understand those by the conversation. It's the same thing in Spanish. Okay, now let's move to the top right, nuestro. Nuestro means our something, but this one can also change for gender, and it can become nuestra, okay. So our car, nuestro carro. Our house, nuestra casa. Now let's move to the vosotros form, Spain form, meaning your plural. It belongs to all of you. This one can also change for gender as well. Now the bottom right, su again. We're going to use su just like on the bottom left. We're going to use su to say their something or your something plural, speaking to a group, two or more people. All right, there's one thing I want to tell you about these possessive adjectives. They can all become plural. Let's go back to mi for a second, top left. I say my house, mi casa. My houses, mis casas. Now it becomes plural. My car, mi carro. My cars, mis carros. Okay, both become plural. All of these can become plural. Now look over at nuestro again. So we say nuestro carro, our car. Our cars, nuestros carros. Our house, nuestra casa. Our houses, nuestras casas. Okay, so all of those can become plural. All right, so now we can bring those into our conversation. Now let's try to put some things together. Let's talk about describing someone. First of all, we're describing a person and we say her name is. We have two options to say her name is because we're telling about our family. We can first say se llama. Now really that means to herself she calls. In other words, she calls herself. So se llama is one way to say her name is. You can also say su nombre es. See, now we're bringing in that possessive adjective, literally saying her name is. Okay, so there are two ways you can talk about somebody's name. Let's talk about age now. Talking about how old somebody is, we don't say I am. We say I have however many years. Look at this sentence here. We're going to say she's 14 years old. Nope, she is not 14. She has 14 years. It's going to look like this. Ella tiene 14 años. She has 14 years. I am 40 years old. Yo tengo 40 años. I have 40 years. Not really, I'm a little older than that. But anyway, so let's put some things together and describe yourself. So I'm going to talk about myself really quick. Mi nombre es Danny. Tengo 47 años. Yo vivo en los Estados Unidos. I live in the United States. Los Estados Unidos. The States United. Okay, so we can really start describing people now. Somebody, you're getting to know somebody and they say, ¿Cómo se llama tu hermana? What are they asking? ¿Cómo se llama tu hermana? What is your sister's name? Okay, I can say se llama or I can say su nombre es. And then now I can say she is, you know, 30 years old or whatever. Talk about where she lives. So what I want you to do is to start trying to describe your family members. Start trying to pick out people in your family, talk about where they live, what they're like, bring in those description words, tall, short, brunette, blonde, smart, all those kinds of things. Really talk about your family. Okay, next thing I want to give you is ordinal numbers one through ten. Now you might be saying, why are we going to bring in ordinal numbers right now when we're talking about the family? Well, because it actually works really well in conversation. I'll tell you why in just a minute. Ordinal numbers are those numbers in Spanish up to ten, because that's about as high as they go in Spanish, that say first or second or third or fourth. And so these actually can be used when you're talking about where somebody lives. All right, so let's get those down only first through tenth right now, because really above that we don't really use ordinal numbers too much in Spanish above that. So first is going to be See, that almost looks like cousin, right? You can remember this because you can think of primer in English and put an O on it, or prime and put an RO. All those things kind of mean first or get something started in English. Next one, second, is Now for the fourth, I want you to think of the number four, cuatro, and flip the R and the T. Now instead of cuatro, it's cuarto, cuarto. That's fourth. Fifth is quinto, quinto. Sixth, Eighth is octavo, octavo. Ninth, noveno, noveno. And tenth is décimo, décimo. So I can start talking about myself and where I live, vivo en los Estados Unidos. You can talk about the city you live in. We can even get specific if you're giving someone directions to come into your house for the first time. Look at this sentence here. Or she lives in the third house. Okay, so now we can really get specific with our discussion. Okay, now let's talk about a friend. Let's just kind of put things together really quick. Let's talk about our friend Carmen. Carmen. So, mi amiga. Ella es mi amiga. She is my friend. Se llama Carmen. Her name is Carmen. She lives in the fifth house. Wow, we put a lot of stuff together today. I encourage you friends to start describing your family, start describing your friends, maybe even make a new friend and use all of this in conversation. And I just want to mention before we close this lesson, there are lots and lots of social media outlets for you to practice Spanish. There are people in the world on websites that allow you to specifically go on and practice in conversation with a native speaker. So, I encourage you to Google some of those sites, language practice sites. You'll come up with several. You can put in your profile information. It'll match you with a bunch of people. You can shoot some messages. Next thing you know, you're face to face talking with a native speaker and now you can tell all about yourself and where you live and your age and all of that. So, practice, practice, practice my friend and I'll see you next time on The Language Tutor. Friends, thanks for watching The Language Tutor. If you have a question for me, feel free to leave it in the comment section below the video and please click subscribe and the notification bell so that you'll never miss any of our language lessons.