I have really enjoyed seeing how other teachers approach the same topics, and I love to purchase resources from other teachers to supplement the things that I have developed on my own. While many of us sell complete units on TpT that we have created for our own classes, there is no rule that says that you have to stick to the plans exactly as we wrote them and used them in our classes. We need to say 'To Elena,' 'To Marcos,' and 'To Rodrigo and Felipe.Today and tomorrow (May 9-10, 2017) is the annual Teachers Pay Teachers sale, and I want to share with you some of my favorite teacher-authors so that you can stock up on materials from their stores!! Remember that the a is necessary because even though Elena, Marcos, Rodrigo and Felipe are at the beginning of the sentence, they're the objects of the sentence, not the subjects. (Their school is pleasing to Rodrigo and Felipe.) In a similar way, if you need to include someone's name in the sentence, you'll start with a followed by their name, and you'll still use the indirect object pronoun: Even if we don't need to, we always use an indirect object pronoun with gustar. It may seem redundant to include both a él and le in the same sentence since they mean the same thing, but it happens regularly in Spanish. For instance, how would you translate these sentences?Ī Indiana Jones no le gustan los serpientes. However, if you use le or les, it's not readily apparent whom you're talking about. If you use me, te, nos, or os as your indirect object pronoun, the meaning of the sentence should be clear. Regardless of grammar, you're more likely to see and hear the singular gusta when the subject has an y in it, even if the subject is countable. If your subjects are non-countable (abstract, indefinite), you should treat them as singular and use gusta: The official rule comes down to 'countability.' If your subjects are 'countable' (tangible, concrete, specific), you should treat them as plural and use gustan: Things get a little messy when y is used in the subject. Once you've learned about using plural subjects with gustar, you may encounter sentences that look like they contain a grammatical error, such as the following:Īrt and music are two things, right? Shouldn't gusta (singular) really be gustan (plural)? IOP (of person being pleased) + gustar + subject (thing that is pleasing) So how do we do that in Spanish? Follow this formula: So instead of 'Pizza is pleasing to me' we should translate:

Therefore the subject (the thing that is pleasing) comes at the end of the sentence, the form of gustar comes in front of that, and the sentence starts with an object pronoun (which refers to the person being pleased). Rather than appearing at the beginning of the sentence, the subject comes after the verb. Gustar is a member of a class of verbs sometimes called 'backward verbs.' Sentences that use these verbs have an abnormal sentence structure. So how do we translate 'Pizza is pleasing to me'? Well, we still need to make another change before we can translate. Notice that what used to be the object (pizza) is now the subject of the sentence, and what used to be the subject (I) is now an object (me). The meaning hasn't changed, but you're expressing it a different way. Instead you'll need to first change the sentence to something like this: It's more accurate to say that gustar means 'to be pleasing.' Knowing that, you can see that you can't really translate 'I like pizza' word for word. While it's not wrong to say that gustar means 'to like,' it's not exactly true either. This might prompt you to translate the sentence like this:īut that's not the correct translation even though gustar is the appropriate verb to use in this situation.

If you look up 'to like' in the dictionary, you'll probably be told to use gustar. How would you translate the following sentence? Gustar is the most common of these verbs. Certain Spanish verbs basically work in reverse, which forces us to change the order of the sentence. Here both sentences start with a subject, move on to a verb, and finish off with an object.īut this isn't always the case. Spanish sentences generally use the same order and sentence structure as English sentences.

Que comida te gusta mas in english