El grano de café está tostado y molido.

Questions & Answers about El grano de café está tostado y molido.

How do we form the words tostado and molido here?
These are past participles. To make them, you take the verbs tostar (to roast) and moler (to grind), drop their endings, and add new ones. For -ar verbs like tostar, you add -ado to get tostado. For -er verbs like moler, you add -ido to get molido.
Since tostado and molido come from verbs, why are they used like adjectives here?
Past participles are often used as adjectives to describe the state or result of an action. When acting as adjectives, they must match the gender and number of the noun they describe. Since el grano is masculine and singular, both words end in -o. If we were talking about multiple beans (los granos), they would become tostados and molidos.
Why do we use está instead of es with these words?
We use estar with past participles when we want to describe a condition, state, or the result of an action. The beans went through a roasting and grinding process, and now they are in that finished state. Using estar focuses on how the bean is right now as a result of what happened to it.
Why is it grano de café instead of just stacking the words like in English?
In Spanish, you cannot stack nouns directly next to each other like we do in English with coffee bean. Instead, you use the main noun (grano) followed by the word de (of) and then the descriptive noun (café). It literally translates to bean of coffee.

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