A post about snow and adverbs

Like the song says, "Baby, it's COLD outside." Two students who are in London are reporting that there's quite a bit of snow in the south-east UK, and my friend Álvaro, who lives just north of Madrid, says that he's got about 10 cm of snow on his car.

Here's a photo of the thermometer on my balcony, taken today at 9:17 AM:

It seems like today is a good day to write about adjectives and adverbs: It's really cold out there today.

One of the jobs of adverbs is to give us more information about adjectives. We often do this with adverbs of degree:

• It's cold outside.
• It's really cold outside.
• It's surprisingly cold outside.
• It's shockingly cold outside.
• It's ridiculously cold outside.

English speakers often do this in order to give you a very specific idea of their opinion about something.  Why? Our ideas of cold are probably different - and, even then, we have so many degrees of cold that it helps me be specific about what kind of cold I mean.

This isn't really common in written Spanish, and almost no one uses it in normal, spoken Spanish. It's very common with English speakers, however, so if you're not sure about how to use adverbs to describe adjectives, be sure to ask your teacher.

Today's Grammar/Vocabulary Video: LIKE versus AS

You know, it's funny -- of all the things that people ask about in class, I think that the difference between LIKE and AS is the easiest to explain -- but no one seems to do it! So here's a Doceri video explaining the difference between the two words.

If you're a current STOP SPANGLISH student, send me an e-mail and I'll send you an exercise to help you practice this.

Wednesday's Word Challenge

The biggest difference between adverbs and prepositions is that adverbs usually give an idea of movement and prepositions describe the space relationships between things that don't move.

Which prepositions and adverbs would you need to describe your trip between home and work (or home and school)?