Learn the answer to the question 'Can I use adjectives as nouns?'
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| Ask a teacher, lesson 16 - How do you use adjectives as nouns in Spanish? |
| Hi everybody! Rosa here. Welcome to Ask a Teacher, where I’ll answer some of your most common Spanish questions. |
| The question for this lesson is… |
| How do you use adjectives as nouns in Spanish? |
| In Spanish, we can omit the noun and use the adjective as the noun. When an adjective is used as a noun, we call it adjetivo sustantivado, which means "adjective used as a noun." |
| Does that sound confusing? Let’s go through some examples. |
| Let’s say you’re at a furniture store and you want to buy a chair. If we’re looking at a bunch of different colored chairs, you can use la silla roja to refer to “the red chair.” However, in this case, you’ve already mentioned the chairs and their colors, so you can just say la roja, which means, “the red one.” |
| By using an article with an adjective, you can make it a noun. In this case, we used la because la silla, “the chair,” is feminine. Then, we added the adjective, roja, to make la roja, to mean “the red chair.” |
| Likewise, if you’re discussing different colored hats, you’d use the masculine noun sombrero. That means we have to change la to the masculine article el. Then, if you would like to buy the red hat, you would say, El rojo, por favor. meaning “The red one, please.” |
| Take into consideration that the adjective has to match the noun in gender and number. Silla is a feminine noun, so we use roja, which is also feminine; sombrero is a masculine noun, so we use rojo, which is also masculine. |
| Superlatives can also become nouns in Spanish. Apart from the direct translation of “the best,” which is el mejor or la mejor, you can use any adjective, plus an article, plus either más for “most,” or menos for “least” to make a superlative sentence. |
| Más on its own means “more,” but with an article, it means “most.” Take el más grande, for example. Grande means “big.” So el grande means “the big one,” in general. But, if you said, el más grande, that means, “the biggest one.” |
| Similarly to más, menos means “less” on its own but “least” with an article. La menos rápida, for example, literally means, “the least fast one” or, more naturally, “the slowest.” |
| It’s important to note that because we use la in this sentence, we know that we’re talking about a feminine noun. If we were talking about a masculine noun, the sentence would be El menos rápido. |
| How was this lesson? Pretty interesting, right? |
| Do you have any more questions? Leave them in the comments below and I’ll try to answer them! |
| ¡Hasta luego! “See you later!” |
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