Most Spanish adverbs are formed by adding -mente to the feminine singular form of the
adjective. This ending corresponds to -ly in English.
Fem.
Form
Adjective
Adverb
claro
clara
claramente
constante
constante
constantemente
difícil
difícil
difícilmente
Note: When an adjective has a written accent, the adverb retains it.
Another way to form an adverb is to use the preposition con + the singular form of the
noun.
cuidadoso (carefully)
cuidadosamente or con cuidado
perfecto (perfectly)
perfectamente or con perfección
cariñoso (affectionately)
cariñosamente or con cariño
Some adverbs do not follow any pattern of origination, and must simply be memorized.
Here is a list of some common ones:
bastante
quite
demasiado
too
mal
badly
mucho
a lot
muy
very
nunca
never
peor
worse
poco
little
siempre
always
When two adverbs modify the same verb, only the second one uses the -mente ending.
Note that the first adverb is the same as the feminine singular form of the adjective.
Juan trabaja lenta y cuidadosamente.
Juan works slowly and carefully.
El chico le habló clara y cortésmente.
The boy spoke to him clearly and courteously.
El autor escribió rápida y fácilmente.
The author wrote quickly and easily.
On the one hand, prepositions in Spanish are easy to understand, because they usually function in
almost the same way as they do in English. On the other hand, prepositions can be one of the most
challenging aspects of using Spanish, because it is not always easy to remember which preposition to
use. A simple and very common preposition such as the Spanish en can be translated not only as "in,"
the most common translation, but also as "to," "by" and "about," among others.
A preposition is a type of word that is used to form a phrase; the phrase in turn functions as an
adjective or adverb. In both English and Spanish, a preposition is followed by an object, which is
usually a noun. The object also can be a pronoun or verb that functions as a noun. (Sometimes in
English a preposition can appear at the end of a sentence, but that isn't done in Spanish.) If all this
doesn't make clear to you what a preposition is, that's fine — just look at the list below and it should
be clearer what types of words we're talking about.
Let's look at a couple of sample sentences to see how the preposition relates its object to other parts
of a sentence.


English: I (subject) am going (verb) to (preposition) the store (prepositional object).
Spanish: Yo (subject) voy (verb) a (preposition) la tienda (prepositional object).