Listening practice for beginners • Occupations

¡Hola! Welcome to Spanish from Zero, a podcast for people who are just starting the amazing journey that is learning Español. Today we’re gonna practice talking about occupations. 

Here’s how it usually goes:

• ¿Qué haces? (What do you do?)

• Yo soy… (I am…)

Note that in Spanish we tend to not use articles (a, an) when describing someone’s job title:

Yo soy profesora. (Literally: I am teacher)

The other thing we have to keep in mind whenever we’re describing someone is their gender. These are the most common word endings when it comes to occupations:

• Gender neutral endings:

ISTA:el artista / la artista, etc.

NTE: el estudiante / la estudiante, etc.

• Feminine vs. Masculine endings:

O / A: el secretario / la secretaria, etc.

OR / ORA: el profesor / la profesora, etc.

Okay! Now that the explanation is out of the way, let’s practice a little bit. I’ll say a couple of sentences and you need to figure out if I could be describing a man, a woman, or either one:

Es arquitecta