Learn to Talk About Household Chores

When you’re learning a language, you’ll want to practice whenever you can. Talk about things you like to do, don’t like to do, your favorite places and memories, and even what you ate for breakfast! Learning household chores in Spanish is going to help you explain your daily life and feel like your conversations are more complete.

Also, you’ll be able to give more excuses or reasons why you can or can’t do something. Instead of a simple sí or no, you’ll have a much larger vocabulary to describe what you have to do. Ready to learn? Let’s go!

Common household chores in Spanish

1. lavar los platos (to wash the dishes)
2. limpiar la cocina (to clean the kitchen)
3. sacar la basura (to take out the trash)
4. lavar la ropa (to wash clothes)
5. hacer la cama (to make the bed)
6. arreglar los dormitorios (to tidy up the bedrooms)
7. pasar la aspiradora (to vacuum)
8. quitar el polvo (to dust)
9. cortar el césped (to cut the grass)
10. poner/quitar la mesa (to set/clear the table)

Using this vocabulary in real life

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Now that you’ve memorized a list of vocabulary words, let’s figure out how to put them in practice. Simply knowing the vocabulary words won’t be much use if we don’t know how to put them in sentences. The above vocabulary words are verb phrases, meaning they are made up with a verb and more. In these examples, they are made up of a verb, then the noun.

State that you do these things

Using the yo form of each verb, which is the first word in each of these sentences, you can say “I…” In order to conjugate them in the yo form, you’re going to take off the -ar or -er ending and add an “o”. For example, to say “I vacuum” I would say “Yo paso la aspiradora.”

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However, some verbs are irregular in the yo form! Hacer becomes hago and poner becomes pongo.

Ask what household chores someone else does

Similarly to the previous section, you can use the tú form to ask if someone else does that chore. For -ar verbs, you need to change the ending to -as, and for -er verbs, you’re going to change the ending to -es. For example, I would say, “¿Cortas el césped?” to ask “Do you cut the grass?

Use them with other verbs

Maybe you want to add a little more flare to your sentence, or what you want to say is a little different.

1. Necesito + verb phrase= “I need to….” Use this if you want to say what you need to do. For example, “Necesito lavar los platos” would mean “I need to wash the dishes.” Note that you don’t conjugate the verb lavar because in Spanish, you can’t have two conjugated verbs next to each other.
2. Quiero + verb phrase= “I want to…” This is how you would express things you want to do. To make it negative, add the word “no” before quiero. If you say “No quiero limpiar la cocina”, you’re saying “I don’t want to clean the kitchen.

We hope you learned a few new ways to describe your chores! Are there more that you’d like us to show you? Let us know in the comments.