Adjektive: Kongruenz

An English adjective looks the same whatever it describes: a tall boy, a tall girl, tall boys. A Spanish adjective takes on the gender and number of its noun, so alto has four forms and you pick the one that matches.

Three kinds of adjective

Most adjectives in -o have four forms. Those in -e (grande, verde, alegre) and most in a consonant (fácil, azul, joven) change for number but not for gender: una casa verde, unos árboles verdes. Adjectives in -ista work the same way: un chico optimista, una chica optimista.

Watch two groups that end in a consonant and still add -a for the feminine: nationalities (inglés → inglesa, alemán → alemana, francés → francesa) and adjectives in -or (trabajador → trabajadora, hablador → habladora). Note that the accent of inglés disappears in inglesa, ingleses.

Agreeing across the sentence

Agreement is not only for adjectives sitting next to the noun. After ser and estar the adjective still matches the subject: La paella está buenísima. Mis hermanas son muy simpáticas. Las tiendas están cerradas el domingo.

When one adjective describes a mix of masculine and feminine nouns, it goes into the masculine plural: Mi padre y mi madre son altos. El pan y la tortilla están ricos.

Before or after the noun?

English puts the adjective in front: "a red car". Spanish usually puts it after: un coche rojo, una casa grande, el vino blanco, la cocina mexicana. Colours, nationalities and shapes go after the noun in normal speech.

A few common adjectives often come first, and some of them shorten in front of a masculine singular noun: bueno → un buen vino, malo → un mal día. Grande shortens to gran in front of any singular noun, and changes its meaning on the way: una ciudad grande is a big city, una gran ciudad is a great one. Madrid is both.

What English speakers get wrong

• Leaving the adjective in the dictionary form: *la casa blanco, *una chica alto → la casa blanca, una chica alta.
• Forgetting the plural on the adjective: *los zapatos negro → los zapatos negros. In Spanish the -s turns up on every word: las gafas nuevas.
• Agreeing with the speaker instead of the noun. A man describing his flat says Mi casa es pequeña: the adjective follows casa, not him.
• Putting the adjective first out of habit: *un rojo coche → un coche rojo.