Amazon River boat to school (Spanish A1)
Marta takes her brother to school by boat on the Amazon. Near Manaus the dark Negro runs beside the brown river, and no bridge crosses the water.
Río Amazonas
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About this article
What you'll learn
Present tense, querer, porque and pero, ser and estar, and river words: río, barco, orilla, agua dulce.
One morning Marta and her father take Pedro to school by boat, because there is no road. They see a pink river dolphin, the dark Negro running beside the brown Amazon near Manaus, macaws that eat clay for salts, a pirarucu that breathes air, and small piranhas. The river is more than six thousand kilometers long, sends almost a fifth of the river water that reaches the sea, and has no bridges.
After reading
Article learning block
Phrases, words, grammar, and quick practice from this text.
Phrases for training
Add useful phrases to SRS or mark them as already known.
el río más grande del mundo
newthe biggest river in the world
Relative superlative: el + noun + más + adjective + del mundo. The article el is obligatory.
The pattern for saying something is the biggest, longest or oldest of a group.
la cuenca del Amazonas
newthe Amazon river basin
La cuenca is all the land whose rivers drain into one big river. De + el contracts to del: la cuenca del Amazonas.
Geography word you meet in every text about rivers, plus the obligatory contraction del.
la selva tropical más grande del mundo
newthe biggest tropical rainforest in the world
Selva is a tropical rainforest; bosque is an ordinary forest. Note the adjective order: selva tropical, not tropical selva.
Two words English merges into one, and a reminder that Spanish adjectives follow the noun.
hacen mucho ruido
newthey make a lot of noise
Spanish uses hacer, to make, for noise: hacer ruido. Mucho agrees with the masculine noun ruido.
Fixed collocation: never use tener or dar here.
el rey de la selva
newthe king of the jungle
A set phrase for the top predator of a place. In the Amazon it is the jaguar, not the lion.
Common metaphor, and a good example of de + la staying separate: de la selva.
sube a la superficie para respirar aire
newit comes up to the surface to breathe air
Subir a means to go up to a place; para + infinitive gives the purpose. The pirarucú has to breathe air, so it cannot stay under water.
Two everyday patterns at once: subir a and para + infinitive.
ayuda a regular el clima de la Tierra
newit helps to regulate the climate of the Earth
Ayudar takes a before an infinitive: ayuda a regular. El clima is masculine even though it ends in -a.
Two traps in one line: the preposition after ayudar, and a masculine noun ending in -a.
Key words
Vocabulary that carries the school-day topic.
River
río
river
El río is a masculine noun: el río, los ríos. The accent on the i marks two separate syllables, ri-o.
The key word of the text, and its accent shows how Spanish splits a vowel pair.
Rainforest
selva
tropical rainforest, jungle
La selva is specifically hot wet forest; el bosque is a forest anywhere. Jungla exists but is rarer.
Spanish splits into two words what English calls forest.
Fresh water
agua dulce
fresh water
Agua dulce is river water, the opposite of agua salada, sea water. Dulce on its own means sweet, so this is a false friend.
A trap: dulce here means fresh, not sweet.
Jaguar
jaguar
jaguar, the big cat of the Amazon
Plural jaguares, with -es. Spanish took the word from Tupi-Guarani, a language of the Amazon, and passed it on to English.
Shows how Spanish borrowed from the languages of America, and that nouns in -r add -es.
Macaws
guacamayos
macaws, big bright parrots
Un guacamayo is a large long-tailed parrot; the feminine guacamaya is used in some countries. A small parrot is un loro.
Regional word worth knowing: guacamayo in most of South America, guacamaya in Mexico and the Caribbean.
They hang
cuelgan
they hang, they dangle
From colgar, to hang. It is a stem-changing verb: cuelga, cuelgan, but colgamos and the infinitive colgar keep the o.
Stem-changing verbs are the main surprise of the Spanish present: colgar gives cuelga, not colga.
Banks, shores
orillas
river banks, shores
La orilla is the edge of a river, a lake or the sea. For a road you say el borde instead.
One word for river bank, lake shore and seaside.
Grammar in context
Patterns from the text worth noticing after reading.
Superlative in the plural
los peces más famosos del río
the most famous fish in the river
With a plural noun the whole phrase goes plural: los peces más famosos. Compare the comparative más largo que, which needs que and no article.
Shows the difference between el más grande del mundo and más largo que, the two structures the text uses.
The definite article
artículo determinado: el, la, los, las
el, la, los, las
Every Spanish noun carries an article: el río, la selva, los guacamayos, las lianas. One catch: a feminine noun beginning with a stressed a takes el, so you say el agua, but the adjective stays feminine: el agua fría.
Spanish has no bare nouns where English drops the, and this text is full of them.
Ser, estar and tener
presente de indicativo: ser, estar, tener
it is, it is located, it has
Estar gives position: está en Sudamérica. Ser gives identity: es el río más grande del mundo. Tener gives measurements: tiene seis mil kilómetros, where English uses is.
Three verbs where English uses to be twice and to have once, and the split is the first real hurdle in Spanish.
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