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Preface |
Welcome to the Spanish grammar pages. This first chapter contains meta-information about this project such as scope and license. Navigate the pages using the menu icon on the top left corner.
These pages cover the bulk of the grammar of the official language of Spain, the Castilian language (castellano). Each chapter starts with an introduction of the general grammatical topic at hand and a summary of the English grammar. Concepts are compared to their English counterparts where applicable. All chapters contain a large number of examples and exercises.
The many regional Spanish languages such as Galician and Basque are not covered here, neither are the Castilian dialects that exist throughout Spain. However, we will occasionally point out differences between castellano and the Latin American Spanish dialects. Besides the few grammatical and syntactical differences, the phonetic differences stand out most because it is the slightly distinct pronunciation which makes the Latin American dialects sound "softer" than castellano. None of these differences cause serious communication problems, though.
This work is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA), which is also used by Wikipedia. Put simply, this license permits third parties to build upon this work as long as they credit the authors and license their updates under the same terms.
The primary location of this project is
These pages don't perform any kind of user tracking. In particular, they don't set cookies and don't include code which asks your browser to inform third parties such as web analytics services about your identity and the pages you are visiting. The pages are designed to work well with any browser, including plain text browsers, and don't contain javascript.
All pages are free of advertisements. We don't ask you to pay or donate money, to subscribe to a newsletter, or to "like" something on social media. Instead, we ask you to send feedback to the author.
The following conventions are used throughout the text:
No database, no content management system and no scripting language is used in this project. Instead, the html pages are generated from plain text source files using GNU m4 and GNU make on Linux.
The logo and the style sheet were written from scratch using an ordinary plain text editor (vim) with no support for svg or css besides syntax highlighting. The generated contents are copied to the web server with rsync. The source files are tracked in a git repository.
The author's primary motivation behind this work was to learn the Spanish grammar himself. He is is neither a native Spanish speaker nor a native English speaker, and he has no special background in linguistics either. Therefore the contents are expected to contain many mistakes and inaccuracies.
If you are a native English speaker or a linguist, it will be easy for you to spot something which could be improved. Please don't hesitate to report your findings. The author will then attempt to develop a suitable update together with you.
Although all chapters are complete, only those which have been proofread by a native Spanish speaker have been made public. The non-public chapters can be selected through the navigation menu but contain only the summary of the chapter contents. If you are a native Spanish speaker and want to help out, contact the author. He will ask you to proofread the reviewer version of a non-public chapter of your choice. This version contains the full contents and is annotated with notes and questions for reviewers.
In any case, no computer skills are required to contribute and no account needs to be created anywhere.
If you are a Spanish learner and would like to see more public chapters, try to find a native Spanish speaker who is willing to review a non-public chapter. For example, you could post about this project on your blog or on social networks.
If you liked these pages, you might also enjoy the author's other projects. Check out his home page.