Quickly Understanding Spanish Adverbs

Adding adverbs to your Spanish vocabulary can help your audience better understand how or to what degree or intensity an action is being performed. Spanish has a few different ways to express adverbs: by adding -mente to the end of feminine singular adjectives, by combining a noun with the Spanish preposition con, or by using simple phrases.

Add -mente to the feminine singular form of an adjective

-Mente is the Spanish equivalent of the common English adverb ending -ly. Unlike adjectives, which require agreement in gender and number with the noun they describe, adverbs require no agreement because they modify a verb and not a noun or pronoun. Following are examples of how to form adverbs with -mente.

Use con with the adjective

Sometimes, forming an adverb in Spanish by using the feminine singular form of the adjective is just plain awkward. When writing, you may find the spelling tricky. And at other times, you may not recall the feminine form of the adjective. Luckily, you have an easy way out. You can use the preposition con (with) + the noun to form an adverbial phrase, which functions in the same way as an adverb. The following table highlights some examples of how this works.

Memorize simple adverb phrases

Some adverbs and adverbial expressions aren’t formed from adjectives; they’re words or phrases in and of themselves. Following are some of the most frequently used expressions that fit this description.