You know when you hear an English-speaking American speak Spanish and no matter how good they are, you somehow still know that Spanish isn't their native language? Maybe they didn't include the subject pronoun when they should have, or they didn't put the verb first. It could also be their accent.
Either way, you know something's up.
That's because of native speaker intuition. You have it, they have it, we all have it. It takes a lot of practice to sound like a native speaker of the language you're learning, but it's totally not impossible.
Things like pronunciation and word usage can "out" you as a non-native speaker, but this section's all about syntax—a.k.a. the structure of language. Even though English and Spanish are pretty similar, learning the syntactic differences between the two is a lot trickier than you'd think.
Don't worry, though: we know what we're doing. We consulted our in-house syntactician for this section. Yep, that's a thing.
Keep in mind that not sounding like a native speaker is nothing to be ashamed of. We applaud you for being more than monolingual. You're pretty awesome. Still, we understand if you want to blend in a little better.
Shmoop's got your backs, ELLs.