¡Hola!

We’re sure you’ve heard this word before somewhere… “Hola” is the most common/generalized way of saying “Hi”/“Hello” in Spanish. People use it in all contexts! But of course, just like in English, there are plenty of other ways to greet people, say how are you, and say goodbye. Read on to learn how to have a simple exchange with someone in Spanish. In this post, you’ll learn how to greet and respond to a greeting in Spanish.

How to greet someone in Spanish?

Here are the common ways to greet someone in Spanish.  Always remember that when you go into a store or meet a person, use a greeting to be polite.

Buenos días is used in the morning until noon. Buenas tardes is used after midday usually until the sun goes down. Buenas noches is used in the evening and at night, usually when it gets dark, but, unlike English, we also use it to greet people and not only to say goodbye or when we’re going to bed.

How to say goodbye in Spanish?

Here we have the most common ways to say goodbye or end a conversation.

Informal Greetings in Spanish

For the most part, you can use informal greetings when you know the person you’re speaking with, or when this person is younger than yourself. Here are some examples of informal greetings in Spanish:

Formal Greetings in Spanish

For the most part, formal greetings are used when you’re speaking with someone older than yourself, someone you don’t know, or someone of higher status. It is seen as a more respectful way to address someone. 

If you wish to see these Spanish greetings in action, head over to YouTube for great content. Here is one example of How to Greet in Formal and Informal Spanish.

Here, we share a list of countries with nationalities and languages in Spanish. In most cases, nationalities in Spanish have a feminine and a masculine form, but some of them have only one, like “canadiense” (Canadian).

Remember, nationalities (like all adjectives in Spanish) take a singular or a plural form and sometimes a feminine or a masculine form:

*In Spanish, nationalities and languages are not capitalized, only countries.

Here we have some of the most common nationalities broken down by continent.

Here we have a few phrases often used with nationalities.

Now that you’re familiar with nationalities, countries, and languages, check out some of our other posts to help you navigate your next trip.  We’d recommend learning Places around town, and if you haven’t seen our topic on Greetings in Spanish yet, take a look now.

In Spanish, we use the Present Progressive, also known as the Present Progressive tense (called “Presente Progresivo” in Spanish), to talk about things that are happening now or taking place while we’re speaking (at this very moment).

It’s formed with the present tense of the verb “estar” and the gerund of the main verb:

The verb “estar”, which is an auxiliary verb (a verb that helps form a tense), has to be conjugated differently depending on the subject pronoun:

On the other hand, the gerund has two different endings: -ando (for verbs that end in -ar in the infinitive) or -iendo (for verbs that end in -er and -ir in the infinitive) and stays the same for all subject pronouns. In English, we recognize the gerund by the “ing” ending of verbs (speaking, running, living).

There are, of course, irregular verbs. So, just to mention a few important ones:

For -er verbs whose stems end in a vowel, we add -yendo instead of iendo, like leer, traer, oir, etc.

Verbs that have a stem change and end in -ir, like dormir, repetir, pedir, decir, venir, etc. also have a stem change in their gerund, either o –> u or e –> i.

Some verbs are also totally irregular.

Note: “yendo” is not often used in Spanish. It’s used when we want to emphasize we are in the process of getting somewhere, like saying “I’m on my way to work” (estoy yendo al trabajo). In English, we use “going” quite a lot because we need it to form the future. In Spanish, we use a completely different grammatical construction to form this way of expressing the future and we do not use the gerund “yendo”.

And then, we have reflexive verbs, which are verbs indicating that a subject (someone or something) does an action to itself:

These become two-word verbs when we conjugate them: