Questions & Answers about Catorce es más que trece.
Why is es used here?
Why do both numbers stay singular?
Why is it más que and not más de?
Spanish usually uses más que for direct comparisons:
Use más de mainly with amounts, quantities, or expressions of excess, not with this kind of comparison:
So here, because one number is being compared directly to another, más que is correct.
The accent mark shows that más means more.
This is important because mas without an accent is a different word, meaning but, and it sounds formal or old-fashioned in many contexts.
Compare:
So in this sentence, the accent is required: más.
When Spanish talks about numbers in a general or abstract way, it usually does not use an article.
So:
not normally:
You might hear articles in special contexts, though, such as when talking about a specific number in a list, on a jersey, in a lottery, or in a ranking:
But for a basic mathematical fact, no article is the normal choice.
Yes, but más que is the simpler and more natural choice for beginners when comparing numbers as quantities.
Mayor que often means greater than, older than, or bigger than, depending on context. For pure number comparison, both can work, but más que is very straightforward.
A common Latin American pronunciation is roughly:
kah-TOR-seh
A few details:
In IPA, a common pronunciation is /kaˈtoɾ.se/.
The stress falls on tor: ca-TOR-ce.
In most of Latin America, the letters z and soft c (before e or i) are pronounced like s.
So:
In much of Spain, those same sounds are often pronounced with a th-like sound:
Since you are learning Latin American Spanish, the s sound is what you want here.
This word order is perfectly normal in Spanish. It follows a basic pattern:
[subject] + [verb] + [comparison]
So:
Spanish can also express mathematical ideas in other ways, but this version is simple, natural, and easy to understand.
Yes, in meaning, it is essentially the spoken version of that comparison.
If you are reading math symbols out loud, Spanish often uses:
But in normal speech, Catorce es más que trece is also understandable and correct as a comparison of quantity.
Not in this kind of sentence. Catorce and trece stay the same.
Unlike adjectives, these number words do not change for gender here:
They are invariable in this use.
In Spanish, the idea of more than is usually expressed as a unit: más que.
So instead of translating word by word:
Spanish packages the comparison as:
This is very common:
Yes, but it sounds most natural in a mathematical, teaching, or logical context.
In everyday conversation, people would usually compare actual things rather than the numbers themselves:
So the sentence is correct, but it is especially natural in a numbers or math context.