Ser or Estar in Spanish, which one should we use?

Much like te amo vs te quiero, one of the fine points of Spanish is deciding when to use “ser” or “estar” . Both verbs mean “to be”. If you Google “ser or estar” you will find 350 million pages in .29 seconds.

At this one site you will find the definition that I have copied below as well as lots of examples. You you can also check out the other sites for similar definitions and examples. In fact you can find abundant sources of information about grammatical issues, in most commonly studied languages, in less than a second, just by googling. But does it really matter.

Of course it does matter. We would all like to speak correctly. However if you confuse the two verbs,  “ser” and “estar”, you will still be perfectly well understood. On the other hand if you have a limited vocabulary, you won’t understand much of what people are saying and you won’t be able to say very much.

When I have a choice between perfection in grammar and a large vocabulary, I always  choose vocabulary. This does not mean that I don’t want to speak correctly and accurately, I do. I know that I can eventually achieve a high level of grammatical accuracy in the language that I’m studying. But I am in no hurry to get there. On the other hand I am usually driven to increase my vocabulary as fast as possible so that I can understand more interesting things that I want to listen to and read.

Looking for new Spanish content? Check out this LingQ blog post to find a short story in Spanish for you!

How long does it take to learn Spanish? Check out Steve’s blog post to learn about the 5 factors that influence this!