Many students when studying Spanish use también and tampoco in a wrong way. This is because in some languages they are interchangeable or simply because they are placed in a different location in the sentence. Today we help you discover the mistery of these two adverbs.
The first thing to know about them is their usage. También is an adverb that expresses similarity or agreement in an affirmative sentence as an answer to another person.
Maria: Tengo hambre.
Laura: Yo también, vamos a comer algo juntas.
While tampoco is an adverb that expresses similarity or agreement to what the other person said, in a negative sentence.
Maria: Yo no tengo hijos.
Laura: Yo tampoco.
You can simply answer with “yo tampoco” or you can repeat the rest of the sentence in order to emphasize your agreement saying “yo tampoco tengo hijos”.
When you use tampoco you have to be careful because it’s easy to make mistakes. The adverb tampoco admits the negative word “no” in the same sentence, but there is a rule:
- When you use tampoco before the verb, you can’t use NO before the same verb.
Yo tampoco no fumo. X
Yo tampoco fumo. V
- You can use no in the same sentence as tampoco, if there are two negative statements.
No come carne pero tampoco come pescado. (no come carne, no come pescado).
Everything gets more confusing when the verb you want to agree to, uses the personal pronoun “me”. For instance when you want to agree to your friend saying that you like beer too, you have to be careful about the location of the adverb también and the pronoun you use in the sentence.
Miguel: A mi me gusta la cerveza
Roberto: A mi también. (You can’t neither say yo también, nor también a mi).
Same for the negative pronoun tampoco:
Miguel: No me gusta comer verduras.
Roberto: A mi tampoco (you can’t neither say yo tampoco, nor tampoco a mi).
As mentioned before, these two adverbs express similarity, for this reason when the speaker disagree with a sentence, también and tampoco cannot be used.
Sara: Me gusta el chocolate.
Alejandro: A mi no.
Ana: Yo no estudio medicina.
Clara: Yo si.
In our Spanish courses you’ll learn this and much more. Let’s see the courses and start increasing your Spanish level today!
