Aunque

Today’s Spanish word of the day is “aunque”.

It’s a conjunction that can translate as “even though”, “although” or “even if”.

If you think about it, the idea of “even though” or “although” is a bit different to that of “even if”. They all introduce a new clause, but “even though” and “although” introduce something that is true, while “even if” expresses a hypothetical situation. In Spanish, true statements use something called the indicative mood, while hypothetical statements use the subjunctive mood. Here are some examples to make this clearer:

• Aunque está lloviendo, vamos al parque. – Even though/although it’s raining, we are going to go to the park. In this example, the indicative “está” is used because, it’s a fact that it’s raining.
• Aunque llueva, vamos al parque. – Even if it rains, we are going to go to the park. In this example, the subjunctive “llueva” is used because the speaker is considering a possibility (that it might rain), not stating a fact.

When used to express a hypothetical situation, the following verb uses the subjunctive form of the verb in Spanish, hence why it’s “aunque llueva” (subjunctive) for “even if it rains”, but “aunque está lloviendo” (indicative) for “although it’s raining”. The subjunctive mood is a complicated and tricky subject in Spanish, so it’s not possible to go into all the details here, but a good general principle is that it’s used when we express uncertainty, possibility or hypothetical situations. Using certain words like “aunque” to express hypothetical situations (like “even if…”) will trigger its use, and change the way verbs are conjugated.

The word “aunque” was formed by combining the words “aun” (“even”) and “que” (“that”), but it now functions as a single word, a bit like how the English word “although” was formed by combining “all” and “though”.

Example sentences