Multiple Modifiers

A huge difference between English and Spanish is the placement of modifiers like adjectives and adverbs. Spanish doesn't stack adjectives in the same way as English; English needs to punctuate multiple adjectives to avoid confusion.

Basically, Spanish uses more words than English when modifying nouns. For example, a well-functioning machine translates to máquina que funciona bien. This construction goes from using a hyphenated participle as a modifier (English) to a relative clause (Spanish). Most complex modifiers in Spanish are relative clauses.

When to use hyphens and commas between adjectives and adverbs is difficult even for native English speakers, but especially for ELLs who aren't used to these constructions to begin with. In this section, we'll get into the details and provide visual aids.

And hey, maybe you can show this section to your native English-speaking peers so they'll know when to hyphenate.

When to Use Hyphens

This section is meant to teach you how to predict when to use hyphens, but you can check out the Hyphens section of our Punctuation module for the basics. Hyphens exist to connect one or more word...

When to Use Commas

You're supposed to use commas for coordinate adjectives. Here's that visual representation again: Coordinate Adjectives[modifier], [modifier] [noun]Coordinate adjectives are called coordinate betw...