Taking the time to learn different descriptive adjectives in Spanish is very important. Adjectives allow us to increase our vocabulary and describe people, actions, feelings, things, places and ideas. An adjective describes (the white house), modifies (he feels bad), or quantifies (there are many dogs).

One of the main differences between Spanish and English is that adjectives generally go after the noun in Spanish.

Let’s go over a few examples:

In Spanish it is also possible to place the adjective before the noun, but in most of these cases you can place it after the noun as well with little change in meaning. It usually implies the author’s subjective perception (poetic or literary).

Some adjectives in their singular form change a bit when placed before the noun:

Numeral adjectives are also placed before the noun. In their masculine singular form, such as “primero” (“first”) and “tercero” (“third”), they lose their ending before the noun:

Adjectives of quantity, like “poco” (a little, few), “mucho” (a lot, many), “demasiado” (too much), etc. Always come before the noun:

• Hay muchas verduras en el mercado (There are a lot of vegetables at the market).
• Hay poca gente en la playa (There are few people at the beach).

In other cases, adjectives point to an adverbial characteristic of the noun that doesn’t necessarily describe its essence.  Let’s take a look at this example:

• Un viejo amigo: “viejo” tells us something about the relationship between the person speaking and the other one (“an old friend”).
• Un amigo viejo: “viejo” here tells us something about the physical appearance of that person (“a friend who’s old”).

In Spanish, the adjective has to agree with the noun, so this means it can be plural or singular, feminine or masculine (“nuevo”, “nueva”, “nuevos” or “nuevas” = new).  There are three easy rules to follow to know how to change the adjective so it agrees with the noun:

When the adjective ends in -o in the masculine form, change to -a if feminine.  Add an -s if plural:

When the adjective ends in a consonant or the letter -e, no change is made if the noun is feminine but -s or -es must be ended to form the plural, depending on if it already ends in -e or not:

azul – azules

When the adjective ends in -dor, -ón, or -án, add -a to the feminine form, -as to the feminine plural form, and -es to the masculine plural form:

trabajador – trabajadora

trabajadores – trabajadoras

Taking the time to learn the different Spanish adjectives is incredibly important, because they allow Spanish speakers to construct sentences properly.

Note: some adjectives change in meaning if they are used with either “ser” or “estar”, like “seguro / segura” also means “sure” when used in combination with estar. 

*In Spanish, we use the same question to ask for both someone’s appearance and personality:

And we answer using the verb “ser”:

Most of the time, the context makes it clear whether we mean someone’s personality or appearance. We can also ask, for example: “¿Cómo es él/ella físicamente?” (adding the adverb physically) to make it more clear.

When we talk about places we can ask: “¿Cómo es Madrid?”, for example. We’re basically asking someone to describe Madrid.

After this lesson, you should be able to use adjectives to describe people, places, and things.  You learned where to place descriptive adjectives in sentences and also how to change them to agree with the noun they modify. You also practiced some simple questions using “ser”. Now that you’ve mastered adjectives, we recommend moving on the Superlatives and Comparatives to learn how to make comparisons in Spanish.  Take a look at the topics on “Ser” vs. ”Estar” also if you haven’t seen them yet.