In Spanish, the word “either” is translated as four different words! In this guide, I’ll walk you through each one, and you’ll get to practice them all. By the end you’ll know when to use each version, and you’ll get plenty of practice with all of them.
Download our free flashcards here to practice everything from this guide!
In this video version of the guide, I’ll teach and quiz all the different ways to translate “either” in Spanish. By the end of the video, you’ll be saying “either” like a native Spanish speaker.
Or if you can’t watch the video, read the written version of the guide here.
Let’s start with one of the most common uses of “either”, which is in phrases like this:
You do this when someone has to choose between two options, using “or”. And I’m guessing you may know the words for the rest of the sentence:
So how do we translate “either” here? Well, you actually don’t need a new word! You just use o—the same word for “or”. So we have:
So the word o means both “or” and “either”, specifically in situations where you’re listing two things.Here’s another example. Let’s take this phrase in English:
In Spanish, you’d just swap both either and or for “o”:
Now for a more challenging example. Try this one:
In this sentence, we don’t just have a couple of simple items, like “this” or “his house” — instead, we’re listing two entire clauses, “he was here” and “she was here.”But it’s still going to work the same way. First, we’ll start with those two phrases, “he was here” and “she was here”:
Next, the words “either” and “or” will both become o:
Now for an even more complex example. So far, we’ve only looked at examples where “either” is at the beginning of the sentence. But what happens when “either” is in the middle? For example:
Here we’re listing two options: “to your house” versus “to my house”. So here’s the rest of the sentence:
To finish this, we’ll just replace both “either” and “or” with o. So the full sentence is:
Now it’s your turn! Here are a few sentences that use “either” this way. Make sure that you can correctly translate “either”.First example:
OK, admittedly that was pretty easy because you only had one option; “either” was translated as o in all of these sentences. Next, let’s complicate things by learning a few more translations of “either” in Spanish.
So far, we’ve learned how to list out available options using o – but it’s all been positive. Our next use of “either” is a negative use.
Sometimes, in negative situations, “either” is translated as tampoco.
If you know anything about the word tampoco, you’re probably used to situations where it means “neither”. For example:
OK, but what about a sentence like:
In English here, we’re using “either” rather than “neither”, but it’s still a negative situation, not a positive one (she is NOT here either). The word o definitely wouldn’t make any sense here.
In sentences like this, what we’ll do is use the word tampoco. And what’s interesting is that tampoco will replace two words in the sentence: both “not” and “either”.
OK, so… how would you say this sentence in Spanish?
It takes a couple of steps; we have to restructure the sentence a little bit. Let’s start by just pretending that the word “either” isn’t there. If this sentence were simply:
Then we would translate it like this:
Notice that the word no is right after ella and right before the verb, unlike the English; this is an essential sentence structure for saying anything in Spanish. (And if you need more help with Spanish “sentence templates”, I recommend listening to the first 10 episodes of the LearnCraft Spanish Podcast, which will help you learn and master core Spanish sentence structure.)
The good news is that if you know how to say things like ella no está aquí, you actually already know how to use tampoco here — because the word tampoco simply replaces the word no! It always goes in the exact same place in the sentence as the word no.
In other words, to say:
We just say:
So once again, the word tampoco replaces both “no” and “either”. To do that, you specifically place tampoco where no would go in the sentence.
Here’s another example.
Start with just saying “my house is not big”, or:
Then replace no with tampoco.
This is the right way to say “my house is not big either” in Spanish; it’s how any native Spanish speaker would say this.
Here’s another one:
We’ll just drop the word “either” and translate “I don’t have it”:
(Once again, if you have trouble with this “sentence template”, it’s all explained in the first 10 episodes of the LearnCraft Spanish Podcast.)
Next step: If “I don’t have it” is yo no lo tengo, then “I don’t have it either” is:
OK, now it’s time for you to practice this with a quiz. But this time, I’m going to shuffle in both translations of “either”, so you have to decide whether to use o or tampoco. See if you can get this right!
ANSWERS:
The next way to translate “either” is another positive situation, specifically when there is no preference between multiple options.
For example, imagine you want to borrow one of your friend's books. He has two of them on his shelf. You ask him which one you can read, and he tells you:
In a sentence like this, either one directly translates to cualquiera. So you’d say:
It’s important to point out that in this sentence, the English could have been:
So cualquiera can mean “either”, but specifically in cases where you could also say “either one”.
Let’s look at another example. Imagine that you grab one book and your friend grabs the other, and you walk outside to go read at a café. Your friend asks you, “Do you want to go to this café or the other one?” You personally don’t have a preference, so you want to tell him:
To say this, you would say:
Once again, in this sentence, the English could have simply been
So you’ll use cualquiera when the word “either” could also be “either one”.
Let’s practice this with a quiz. Practice choosing between cualquiera, o, and tampoco — see if you can get these right!
ANSWERS
Now, let’s cover just one last way that “either” is translated.
So far, we’ve covered the positive use o, the negative use tampoco, and the positive use cualquiera. Let’s go over one more negative use — and it’s basically just the opposite of cualquiera.
We’ve already been looking at sentences like this:
What about the opposite?
Here, we would need the negative version of the word cualquiera - which is either ninguno or ninguna, depending on if the noun is masculine or feminine.
For example, let’s revisit the story about the books, which are masculine. And let’s say your friend isn’t such a good friend. Instead of “You can read either one”, he says
This would be:
Now let’s go to a feminine example. What if you’re looking at two houses, and you want to say:
This would be:
By the way, we can lengthen this sentence; if you specifically want to say “either one of these houses”, here’s how it would go:
It’s also important to point out that although the last letter of ninguno/ninguna changes, the last letter of the word cualquiera doesn’t ever change. So for example, let’s go back to this sentence:
We would still use cualquiera, with an “a” at the end; there’s no version with an “o” at the end (cualquiera describes both feminine and masculine nouns). So this would simply be:
Let’s get a little more practice with cualquiera, along with ninguno and ninguna. I’m going to throw in both some positive and some negative sentences, so make sure to choose cualquiera for the positive ones and either ninguna or ninguno for the negative ones.
ANSWERS
As you’ve seen, the word “either” can be translated in four different ways in Spanish.
Want to get even more practice saying “either” in Spanish?
You can download all the example sentences from this guide — along with even more examples — so that you can practice all these uses of “either”.
All the sentences focus on “either”, with all the different versions you’ve seen in this video, plus even more examples, for a total of 35 flashcards. Just download the flashcards here, shuffle them up, and start practicing!
