This, that, and the other one.

First experiments with a Latin American keyboard. Please forgive any typos in English or español.

So far everything has been not too difficult. I had a bit of problem with a few verb tenses, but nothing insurmountable so far. Until today: I ran into este/esta,  (this one), ese/esa (that one), and aquello/aquella (that one over there.) There are also plural forms.

They kicked my butt. I didn't think there would be much of a problem. But in Spanish, not only must you figure out whether it's this one, that one, or the other one, you also have to agree in gender and number. And so I got confused (confundido) and barely passed the unit. I suppose I'll have to go back and do it over again just to make sure I have it.

There is a lot of that - gender, number, time, place, and so on - that goes on in Spanish. Of course this necessitates  learning the gender of nouns as well as their plurals. The easy answer to gender is that anything ending in -o or -e  (taco, burrito) is masculine, and anything ending in -a is feminine. There are many exceptions, so just learn the article that goes with the noun.

So with such straightforward (!) rules, one would think that esto would be masculine and esta would be the feminine forms of this.  One would be wrong.

I won't bore you with the rest. Until I get the hang of it, when I visit the local panaderia I'll have to point and grunt rather than say "Quiero ese...no, no, este...no, aquello con chocolate..."