Level A1 · Chapter 2
The gentleman’s house
A tour of the house: the housekeeper, the niece, the lad, the yard, and one small room full of books.
What you will learn
- Say what there is in a place, and where each thing is.
- Choose between un, una and putting no article at all.
- Place things at three distances with aquí, ahí and allí.
Before you read
Two words share the work in this text. Hay announces something you did not know was there, while está tells you where something already known is sitting. Watch which one each sentence picks: the choice is not random, and it is half the lesson.The story in easy Spanish
La casa de Alonso Quijano está en un pueblo de la Mancha.
Alonso Quijano’s house is in a village of La Mancha.
Es una casa grande y vieja, y dentro viven cuatro personas.
It is a big old house, and four people live inside.
Hay un ama de más de cuarenta años, y está siempre en la cocina.
There is a housekeeper of over forty, and she is always in the kitchen.
Hay una sobrina de menos de veinte años, y está cerca de su tío.
There is a niece of under twenty, and she is always close to her uncle.
También hay un mozo para el campo y para la plaza. Está en el corral, con el caballo.
There is also a lad for the fields and for the market. He is in the yard, with the horse.
Detrás de la casa hay un corral pequeño y un pozo.
Behind the house there is a small yard and a well.
La lanza está aquí, al lado de la puerta. Los papeles están ahí, encima de la mesa. Y el caballo está allí, entre la paja.
The lance is here, next to the door. The papers are there, on the table. And the horse is over there, among the straw.
Los libros están en una sala pequeña. Son muchos, y son el problema de esta casa.
The books are in a small room. There are a lot of them, and they are this household’s problem.
Vocabulary
Inside the house
- la cocina
- the kitchen
- la sala
- the room, the parlour
- la puerta
- the door
- la mesa
- the table
Outside the house
- el corral
- the yard
- el pozo
- the well
- la paja
- the straw
- el campo
- the fields, the countryside
- la plaza
- the square, the market
Who lives here
- el ama
- the housekeeper
- la sobrina
- the niece
- el tío
- the uncle
- el mozo
- the lad, the farmhand
Where
- aquí / ahí / allí
- here / there / over there
- dentro
- inside
- detrás de
- behind
- encima de
- on top of
- al lado de
- next to
- cerca de
- near
- entre
- among, between
UN, UNA, and when you use nothing at all
Hay un ama de más de cuarenta años.
Detrás de la casa hay un corral pequeño y un pozo.
El caballo está allí, entre la paja.
The indefinite article. When something turns up for the first time, it arrives with un or una, the two words for “a”. They match the gender of the noun, like everything else in Spanish.
| a / some | the | |
|---|---|---|
| masculine | un corral | el corral |
| feminine | una sala | la sala |
| masc. plural | unos libros | los libros |
| fem. plural | unas mesas | las mesas |
English has no plural of “a”, so unos and unas look odd at first. They mean “some”, or “a few”: unos libros, a few books.
When Spanish uses nothing at all. This is where English speakers overshoot, because English drops its articles too, just in different places.
- Things you cannot count: hay paja, hay agua, hay pan (there is straw, water, bread).
- Plurals in general: hay libros en la sala (there are books in the room).
- Jobs after ser: es mozo, es ama. English insists on “he is a farmhand”, but Spanish flatly refuses.
HAY versus ESTAR. Now the question above. Hay introduces something new. It covers “there is” and “there are” at once, a single form that never changes, however many things follow it. Estar locates something you have already met, and it does change: está, están.
| hay + something new | estar + something known |
|---|---|
| Hay un pozo. | El pozo está detrás. |
| Hay papeles. | Los papeles están ahí. |
There is a shortcut that works almost every time: hay goes with un, una or nothing at all. Estar goes with el, la, los, las or a name.
Three distances. English has two, “here” and “there”. Spanish has three: aquí is where I am, ahí is where you are, allí is away from both of us.
What a broke gentleman ate
A house like this one had four mouths and very little to put in them. The larder was essentially one pot: pulses, a bit of bacon fat, more beef than mutton because beef was cheaper, and bread, a great deal of bread.
Fresh meat was a Sunday event. The rest of the week ran on the same thing reheated, and Friday lentils were not a culinary decision: the Church banned meat on Fridays, so the entire country ate pulses on the same day of the week.
Cervantes tells us that three quarters of this man’s income went on food. With the remaining quarter, Alonso Quijano bought books. That one detail is the whole character, and the novel has barely started.
Cervantes in the original · «Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta…»
Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta, y una sobrina que no llegaba a los veinte, y un mozo de campo y plaza, que así ensillaba el rocín como tomaba la podadera.
He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece not yet twenty, and a lad for field and market who would saddle the nag as readily as he took up the pruning hook.
Cervantes describes the household by counting people and ages, exactly as you did with hay. Look at the three articles (una, una, un) doing the job of this lesson in 1605. A mozo de campo y plaza is an odd-job servant: he saddles the horse and he prunes the vines, and Cervantes says so in a single clause.