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Saying you are ... with adjectives

So far, you've practised Spanish sentences meaning I am ... and he/she is .... On this page, you'll practise some sentences meaning you are ... when referring to a single person.

Saying you are in Spanish when referring to a single person

For now, we'll concentrate on referring to a single person. In Spain and most of Mexico, there are two different ways of saying you when referring to a single person (but see the box opposite):

tú means you when referring to somebody on informal terms, e.g. a friend or somebody with the same job rank or social status;
usted (often written Ud in Spain) means you when referring to somebody on more formal terms, e.g. to your boss, teacher or a customer.

The factors that decide whether the tú or usted form is used are quite complex, and even for native Spanish speakers it can be a difficult issue. We won't get bogged down in the details for the purpose of this tutorial, and will see the difference as between "addressing a friend" and addressing somebody on "formal terms". In English, the nearest equivalent to "formal terms" would be using a surname such as "Mrs Smith" or a title such as "Sir", "Madam" (although these are often very formal in English).

vos

Spanish actually has a third form of address, vos, for addressing a single person. It is mainstream in Argentina and used to some extent (e.g. as a regionalism or by certain social classes) in many countries in Latin America. It's unusual for foreign learners to use vos forms because:

vos is generally an "intimate" form, more informal than tú, and used for solidarity within a family or community– so it may not be appropriate for somebody outside such a community to use vos;
the corresponding verb form differs from country to country;
it's generally a spoken, not a written, form, and few learning materials are purely spoken.

In Spain, vos is found in older literature and in biblical texts, and the verb form is the same as vosotros (see later in this tutorial).

Verb forms

The verb forms for these forms of address are generally as follows:

The formal usted form is always the same as the he/she form;
The informal tú form is generally the he/she form with an -s on the end.

The first of these statements is always true for any Spanish verb; the second of these statements is true for nearly all Spanish verbs, and in nearly all tenses, including the verb (estar - to be) that we're using here.

As we mentioned, Spanish subject pronouns are generally omitted, so that (tú) estás would generally just be estás. In the case of the usted form, the verb form is the same as the he/she form. So it may be slightly more common to pronounce the pronoun usted in order to make the subject clear.

This then gives the following usual forms for saying you are ...:

(usted) está you are ... (formal mode of address)
estás you are ... (informal mode of address)

In the rest of the examples on this page, we'll omit tú and put usted in brackets. In the "fridge magnets" exercises at the end of this page, you'll omit usted just for the sake of simplicity.

Using an adjective with está(s)

As before, when using está and estás with an adjective, you need to make the adjective form match the gender of the subject, which in this case is the person you're speaking to. So, using the adjective cansado (tired), this gives the following four combinations for you're tired, depending on the gender of the person being spoken to, and on whether they're being addressed on formal or informal terms:

Examples of using **estás** and **está** with an adjective.
Mode of address	Talking to male person	Talking to female person
Informal (e.g. to a friend, family member)	estás cansado you're tired	estás cansada you're tired
Formal (e.g. to a customer, teacher, boss etc)	(usted) está cansado you're tired, Mr X	(usted) está cansada you're tired, Mrs X

Exercise: make sentences with estás/está and an adjective

Now we'll add estás and está (with the meaning of you are ...) to the forms to practise. Remember that está will be used now for either the "he/she" meaning, or for "you" in a formal sense. When you are asked to give a sentence meaning you are ..., it will be made clear whether you're talking to a friend (requiring informal estás) or addressing somebody using a formal mode of address (requiring está). In any case, don't forget to make the adjective form agree with the gender of the subject! (For "I" and "you" forms, either male or female will be specified.)

If you don't see the two buttons, click here

Next...

On the next page, we're going to introduce a second way of saying "I am" used with certain adjectives. That is, we'll introduce the difference between ser and estar.

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