Spanish I

Differentiating between sino and pero

To make a sentence negative, there are some special issues that you must understand. You cannot simply translate the words of a negative English sentence and create an idiomatically correct and understandable negative sentence in Spanish. If you think it sounds a bit silly when a new English speaker says, “He no studies nothing,” you will want to learn how to avoid the equivalent mistake as you learn Spanish.

English speakers seem to use mathematic logic in their sentence structure, which means that two negatives make a positive. The Spanish simply do not see the need to apply a math concept to language structure. In the Spanish perspective, a sentence that is negative should be completely negative. Instead of avoiding a double negative, Spanish sentences use all the negative words possible when a sentence is negative.