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Los estudiantes necesitan mucha paciencia.

Los estudiantes necesitan mucha paciencia.
The students need a lot of patience.
From Lesson 50:Very vs. a lot (muy, mucho)·Spanish (Latin America)

Questions & Answers about Los estudiantes necesitan mucha paciencia.

Why do we use mucha instead of muy or mucho here?
In Spanish, muy means "very" and is used before descriptions (adjectives). Since paciencia (patience) is a thing (a noun), we need to use a form of mucho to mean "a lot of." We specifically use mucha because mucho must match the gender of the noun it belongs to, and paciencia is a feminine word.
How do I know that paciencia is feminine?
A great trick to remember is that Spanish words ending in -cia, like paciencia or diferencia, are almost always feminine. Because it is feminine and singular, it forces the word for "a lot" to become mucha.
The word estudiante ends in "e". Why does it use the masculine article los?
Words referring to people that end in -ante, like estudiante, usually do not change their ending to match gender. Instead, you change the article before it to show who you are talking about. El estudiante is a male student, and la estudiante is a female student. Here, los estudiantes refers to either an all-male group or a mixed group of males and females.
Why does the verb necesitar change to necesitan in this sentence?
Because the subject doing the needing is los estudiantes (the students). This is a plural "they" group. To conjugate a regular -ar verb like necesitar for a "they" subject, you drop the -ar and add -an to the end.

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