Breakdown of El niño camina al parque.
el niño
the boy / the child
caminar
to walk
el parque
the park
al
to the (m)
Questions & Answers about El niño camina al parque.
Why does the sentence use al instead of a el for "to the"?
In Spanish, when the preposition a (to) is followed immediately by the masculine word for "the", which is el, they always combine to form the contraction al. It is mandatory to blend them together, so saying a el parque would be incorrect.
The English translation says "is walking", but isn't camina just "walks"?
It can be both! In Spanish, the simple present tense (camina) is very flexible. It can mean "he walks" as a general habit, but it is also commonly used to mean "he is walking" right at this very moment.
Parque ends in an -e. How can I tell if it is masculine or feminine?
Words ending in -e don't have a strict rule for gender, so you usually just have to memorize them. However, in this sentence, the contraction al gives you a big clue: because al contains the masculine article el, we know that parque must be a masculine word.
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