5.13.1 Grammar Explanation of Comparisons
This is one of several grammar units that is not explicitly connected to any readings in the book but instead provides you with explanations and practice of valuable structures that you need to improve your speaking, writing, and general comprehension of Spanish. This structure is comparisons.
There are two kinds of comparisons: comparisons of inequality (explaining how things are different) and comparisons of equality (explaining how things are the same) . A comparison of inequality is also known as a contrast. In this page we will discuss contrasts and on the next page we will cover comparisons of inequality.
Contrasts (comparisons of inequality)
The basic structure for contrasting is:
Más ______que (or de)….
Menos…. que (or de)….
In the space in between, you need to put a noun
For example:
More than
La lectura de Pedagogía del oprimido tiene más páginas que el poema Paraíso negro.
La dictadura en Chile duró más años que la dictadura en Argentina.
Luisa Valenzuela escribió más novelas que Rosario Castellanos.
Less than
Paraíso negro tiene menos palabras que El delantal blanco.
El país de El Salvador cubre menos tierra que su vecino Honduras.
Luisa Valenzuela publicó menos poesía que Rosario Castellanos.
Comparing verbs
It is also possible to say things like:
Me gusta la obras de teatro más que la novela que leímos.
In this case we are not saying that the play is somehow more than the novel but rather, I like it better. What is being compared is the amount of “liking” the speaker has. The same is true in the negative:
Canto menos que tú.
When to use de
If you refer back to original example, we said that sometimes we don’t use “que” but instead we use “de” in these constructions. This occurs when we compare numbers and we actually use a number in the sentence.
Tengo menos dinero que tú
Tengo menos de veinte dólares.
Both sentences are referring to money which is something we can count. However, only one sentence has an actual number in it so only one sentence uses “de”.
Again, the same is true to talk about more than.
Este libro cuenta con más páginas que el libro anterior.
¡Este libro cuenta con más de 200 páginas!
Activities más que, menos que:
- “Más que/Menos que”:
- Compare the 2 videos using más que and menos que. Write at least 3 sentences. For example: El primer video ofrece una visión menos aplicada de la interconexión entre plantas y árboles que el segundo, que muestra un ejemplo práctico de recuperación de tierras.
