Level A1 · Chapter 3
A day in the village
The gentleman’s day, from morning to evening: the fields, the greyhound, the cooking pot and the books.
What you will learn
- Say what someone does every day.
- Conjugate any verb ending in -ar in the present.
- Understand why Spanish almost never says yo, tú or él.
Before you read
Nearly every verb below ends in -a: madruga, toma, anda, compra. They all belong to one family, and once you have the pattern you have hundreds of verbs. Notice too that no sentence says “he”, and you will still know who is doing everything.The story in easy Spanish
Alonso Quijano madruga mucho y es el primero de la casa.
Alonso Quijano gets up very early, and he is the first one up in the house.
Por la mañana toma un poco de pan. Después anda por el campo con su perro.
In the morning he has a little bread. Then he walks through the fields with his dog.
Caza casi todos los días: el galgo busca y el hidalgo espera.
He hunts almost every day: the greyhound searches and the gentleman waits.
En casa, el ama prepara la comida, y la comida es siempre sencilla.
At home, the housekeeper cooks the meal, and the meal is always plain.
Los sábados toma huevos con tocino y los viernes toma lentejas.
On Saturdays he has eggs with bacon, and on Fridays he has lentils.
Los domingos hay un poco de carne y las otras noches, carne fría con cebolla.
On Sundays there is a little meat, and on the other evenings, cold meat with onion.
La comida gasta casi todo su dinero, y él no compra ropa nueva.
Food eats up almost all his money, and he does not buy new clothes.
Con el resto compra libros, y pasa las tardes con sus libros de caballerías.
With what is left he buys books, and he spends his afternoons with his books of chivalry.
Vocabulary
What he does every day
- madrugar
- to get up early
- andar
- to walk
- cazar
- to hunt
- buscar
- to look for
- esperar
- to wait, to hope
- pasar
- to spend (time)
At the table
- la comida
- the food, the meal
- el pan
- the bread
- los huevos
- the eggs
- el tocino
- the bacon
- las lentejas
- the lentils
- la carne
- the meat
- la cebolla
- the onion
- preparar
- to prepare, to cook
- tomar
- to have (food or drink)
Money
- el dinero
- the money
- gastar
- to spend
- comprar
- to buy
- la ropa
- the clothes
When
- por la mañana
- in the morning
- la tarde
- the afternoon, the early evening
- la noche
- the night, the late evening
- los sábados
- on Saturdays
- siempre
- always
- después
- afterwards, then
The present tense of -AR verbs
Alonso Quijano madruga mucho.
El ama prepara la comida.
Con el resto compra libros.
Spanish verbs are listed in the infinitive, and they come in three groups by ending: -ar, -er, -ir. The -ar group is by far the biggest, and it is also where nearly every new verb invented since 1500 has landed.
You chop off the -ar and add the ending for whoever is doing it:
| tomar: to have (food) | ||
|---|---|---|
| yo | tomo | I have |
| tú | tomas | you have |
| él / ella / usted | toma | he / she has |
| nosotros | tomamos | we have |
| vosotros | tomáis | you have (plural, Spain) |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | toman | they have |
English has one ending in the whole present tense, the -s of “he walks”. Spanish has six, and that is the trade: more to learn once, less to say afterwards.
Note also that compra covers three English sentences: “he buys”, “he is buying”, “he does buy”. Spanish has ways of stressing the “right now” meaning, but the plain present already does that job, so you can forget about them for a long while.
Why nobody says “he”. The subject pronouns exist (yo, tú, él, ella, nosotros, vosotros, ellos), and Spanish speakers leave them out almost all the time. They can, because the ending already tells you who: tomo can only be “I”, tomamos can only be “we”. English needs its pronouns because “take” looks the same for everybody.
So when a pronoun does appear, it is doing extra work: contrast or emphasis. That is why the text says y él no compra ropa nueva: everyone else in the house might, but he does not.
Word order. Subject, verb, object, the same as English: el ama prepara la comida. Spanish moves things around far more freely, though, and puts the subject after the verb whenever the sentence starts somewhere else: En un pueblo de la Mancha vive un hidalgo.
The village of La Mancha
La Mancha is a vast dry plateau in the middle of Spain. It goes past forty degrees in summer and freezes in winter. No rivers worth the name, no forests, not a hill for miles: the kind of horizon where a windmill counts as scenery.
A Manchegan village in 1605 was a square, a church, a handful of whitewashed houses, and grain and vines all around. Everyone knew what their neighbour ate, what he bought, and who he was arguing with. A gentleman who spent his food money on books was not going to stay a secret.
Cervantes opens the novel by pointedly refusing to name the place: “a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember”. Four centuries later the joke is still paying out, because several villages are still fighting over which one he declined to mention.
Cervantes in the original · «Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero…»
Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.
A stew with rather more beef than mutton, cold meat salad most evenings, eggs and bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and the odd pigeon as a treat on Sundays, ate up three quarters of his income.
The gentleman’s diet is organised by days of the week (Saturdays, Fridays, Sundays), exactly as in your text. Duelos y quebrantos, literally “griefs and losses”, means eggs and bacon, though nobody is quite sure why. Lantejas is the old spelling of lentejas.