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LearnCraft Spanish

14: Why do Spanish subject pronouns "disappear"?

LearnCraft Spanish

Timothy Moser

Education, Language Learning

4.9635 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why does Spanish let you start a sentence with "soy" or "son" — without "yo" or "ellos"? And how can you tell when you should include the subject pronoun or leave it out? Let's practice the skill of choosing whether or not to use subject pronouns with Spanish verbs.

Practice all of today's Spanish for free at LCSPodcast.com/14

Transcript

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0:00.0

Do we really need nouns and pronouns to make sentences?

0:06.7

Join us on a rigorous step-by-step journey to fluency.

0:11.7

I'm Timothy, and this is Learncraft Spanish.

0:16.6

Let's talk about why you can actually form Spanish sentences without using nouns or pronouns.

0:23.1

And it has to do with a core difference between English verbs and Spanish verbs.

0:29.0

This week we've been learning ser.

0:31.6

And besides the word ser itself, we've learned five different forms of this verb,

0:40.1

each of them very specific as to whom it's talking about. That's not true in English. In English, we say, I am, you are, we are, we are, they are,

0:55.6

she is.

1:00.8

That's only three different words, am, are, and is.

1:04.6

But in Spanish, all five are clearly distinct. I, soy, you eres, we somos, they son, she is.

1:14.2

All five of those are completely different, specific to who it is that's being talked about.

1:20.1

So something interesting happens if you see one of these words out of context.

1:25.5

In English, if you see the word R out of context by itself, you don't

1:31.1

know who it's referring to. It could be you, we, or they. But if you see the word

1:38.8

Somos in Spanish, it could only be referring to we. And that's why Spanish does something that doesn't

1:48.6

happen in English. Very often, the subject pronouns just disappear. Subject pronouns are words

1:57.6

that are interchangeable with he. So if you think about the sentence template,

2:02.5

he hugged him, all the words that we learned in the him scene like him, her, and me, are object

2:10.5

pronouns, and they're interchangeable with him in this sentence. But words that are

2:15.4

interchangeable with he are subject pronouns, words like we,

2:20.8

I, and she. We hugged him, I hugged him, she hugged him. In English, we don't leave these

...

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