Index / Language / Records / Spanish / Grammar
The cases where both are grammatical and mean different things. At C1 the basics are settled — this sheet is the residue.
The control text · argumentative
Prohibir el celular en clase parece una medida drástica, pero los datos sugieren que funciona. En las escuelas que adoptaron la restricción, los docentes reportan menos interrupciones y una caída en los casos de acoso digital. Es cierto que el aparato también sirve para estudiar, y sería ingenuo negarlo. Aun así, el costo de la distracción recae sobre quienes tienen menos apoyo en casa. Mientras no haya pruebas de que el uso libre mejora el aprendizaje, la carga de la prueba corresponde a quien defiende el permiso.
Where the two part
Latin American · the base
Estar extends further with adjectives of appearance and evaluation in some varieties — está muy bonito where Spain might say es.
Peninsular · the contrast
Slightly more conservative in the same slots, though the boundary is moving in both.
10 options
| Adjective | With ser | With estar |
|---|---|---|
| listo | clever | ready |
| bueno | good (morally) | tasty, well |
| aburrido | boring | bored |
| verde | green | unripe |
The tellTwo grammatical sentences, two unrelated claims.
The clearest demonstration that the choice is semantic rather than a rule about permanence.
A closed list, and each pair has to be known individually.
La suscripción quedó cancelada. — Anchor A · está cancelada
The tellAnchor A uses quedó rather than fue or está.
Quedar plus participle is the precise way to say a state resulted from an action, and learners almost never produce it.
Three options (fue, está, quedó) with real differences, and only one is in the anchor.
El importe fue cargado el día 12.
The tellSer plus participle: the action, not the state.
Correct and formal, and it is what a legal register uses.
Spanish uses the ser passive far less than English does, so overusing it reads as translated — which is the commonest register error in an otherwise strong text.
El importe está cargado. — the state now, not the event
The tellEstar plus participle describes the result rather than the act.
Usually the more natural choice, and it avoids the translated feel of the ser passive.
It removes the event and the agent, so it cannot allege anything.
LatAm La reunión es en Madrid. — an event
Peninsular El banco está en Madrid. — a thing
The tellEvents take ser; objects take estar. The rule about permanence gets this backwards.
A clean distinction that most textbook framings obscure.
It contradicts the permanence heuristic learners are taught first, so it has to be unlearned.
LatAm El café está muy bueno. — this coffee, now
Peninsular El café es muy bueno. — this coffee generally
The tellEstar where a general quality might have taken ser.
Extremely frequent and it carries a real nuance: judgement of an instance rather than of a kind.
The boundary is moving, and some Peninsular speakers use ser where Latin America uses estar.
Es cierto que el aparato también sirve para estudiar. — Anchor B
The tellAnchor B's concession opens with one. Ser before a noun or a clause, always.
Absolute: estar is never possible before a noun, so this half of the domain has no decisions in it.
None.
Están cobrando un servicio cancelado.
The tellThe progressive, which only estar can build.
Straightforward, and unlike Italian there is no competing a-plus-infinitive construction to choose between.
Spanish uses the progressive less than English, so overusing it is a quiet anglicism.
Portuguese ser/estar maps onto Spanish closely but not identically
The tellA choice that is right in Portuguese and marked in Spanish.
Ninety per cent transfers, which makes this cheap to get mostly right.
The remaining ten per cent is invisible because the rest transferred, so errors here go uncorrected for years.
Italian has essere and stare but the division of labour is different, and stare is much narrower
The tellEssere used where Spanish needs estar.
Named because Italian's narrower stare pushes you towards ser, which is the opposite of the Portuguese pull.
Two languages pulling in different directions on the same domain, which is the pattern across this whole repository.