How to present yourself in Spanish?
When you travel to Spain to follow for example a Spanish language course there is a great chance you will meet new people. You probably know how to greet someone and say hola, but can you introduce yourself properly without struggles? We will help you tackle this problem and teach you how to present yourself in Spanish so that you can start making friends right away!
Greetings in Spanish
Let us first go over the basic Spanish greetings to start a conversation. To greet someone in the morning, the best thing is to use “Buenos días”. In Andalusia you will notice that they pronounce these two words a little bit different. It is normal here not to pronounce the letter ‘s’ and thus this greeting can come out without their endings. Buenos días can be used in the mañana (until 14h approximately).
For the afternoon you need to switch to buenas tardes. Pay attention to how the first word changes from masculine (-os) to feminine (-as)! In Spain the afternoon takes a little bit longer than in most countries. You can use buenas tardes until approximately 20h. Afterwards you can switch to “Buenas noches“, which means good evening.
So let’s start with introducing yourself! What to do if someone asks you:
- ¿Cuál es tu nombre?
You can answer this questions with one of the following three sentences:
- Soy + your name (= I am)
- Me llamo + your name (= I call myself)
- Mi nombre es + your name (my name is)
After you introduced yourself with your name it is typically in every language to say “nice to meet you”. In Spanish you can do this by saying:
- Encantado (de conocerte)
Here it is important that you see the difference between encantado and encantada. The gender matches here the person speaking and not the person who you are meeting. Thus when you are a girl you say “encantada” and when you are a boy “encantado”.
All right! Let’s follow this up by getting to know the person you are meeting a little bit more. There are a few words that are very important to compose well-structured sentences.
- Cómo (= how)
- Qué (= what)
- Dónde (= where)
Then there are also some important verbs you will need to properly present yourself in Spanish. The four most important verbs to present yourself in Spain are “hacer”, “tener”, “ser” and “estar”. The more you want to tell the person about yourself, the more verbs you need to use of course. But for the basics, these four verbs will help you very much!
So how can I use the previous words to get to know someone better or these verbs to tell something about myself?
Let's go more into details...
Hacer is often used to ask what someone is doing for work or study for example. A frequently asked question when meeting someone new is the sentence: ¿Qué haces?
To answer this question you often use the verb “ser”, because you are telling him or her something about who you are and your occupation. Answers could be formulated like: “Soy un/una estudiante” or “soy profesor(-a)”. Make sure you use the right form depending on your own gender!
“Ser” is also used tell someone where you are from.
- ¿De dónde eres? (= where are you from?)
- Soy de Holanda (= I am from Holland)
“Estar” is used to answer questions related to how you are doing. An example of a conversation could be:
- ¿Cómo estás? / ¿Qué tal?
- Estoy bien / Estoy mal
One final thing which might be useful to present yourself in Spanish is knowing how to talk about your age. In Spain it is not common to say “I am 20 years old” but instead they say “I have 20 years”. Therefore to talk about your age you use the verb “tener”.
- ¿Cuántos años tienes?
- Tengo veinte años