Weather & Seasons
Weather & Seasons
English describes weather with 'to be' (it is hot). Spanish mostly reaches for 'to make' or 'to have' instead — a genuine mismatch worth learning phrase by phrase rather than word by word.
Grammar Comparison
Grammar Comparison
Hacer (to make) for most weather
hace calor, hace frío, hace sol — literally 'it makes heat', 'it makes cold', 'it makes sun'
it is hot, it is cold, it is sunny — built with 'to be'
Where English says weather 'is' a certain way, Spanish usually says the weather 'makes' that condition, using the impersonal hace. Translating word-for-word from English ('está calor') is a very common learner mistake — hacer is the verb to reach for by default.
But rain and snow get their own verbs
llueve (it's raining), nieva (it's snowing) — single-word verbs, no hacer needed
it is raining, it is snowing — built with 'to be' plus '-ing'
Rain and snow break the hacer pattern entirely: llover (to rain) and nevar (to snow) conjugate on their own as impersonal verbs, with no separate weather word needed. English instead builds these with 'to be' plus a present participle — two different sentence shapes for what's grammatically similar weather vocabulary in Spanish.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
- English
- it's hot
- English
- it's cold
- English
- it's sunny
- English
- it's windy
- English
- it's raining
- English
- it's snowing
- English
- spring
- English
- summer
- English
- autumn / fall
- English
- winter