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- "Es una araña."
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It's a spider! Get the fire!
I see a lot of people got mixed up with "un" and "una". While I do go off the spoken words, I always double check the spelling of the subject. Since "Araña" ends in a, I trusted it was "una" like most other "feminine" words.
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In Spanish there are some exceptions like "El Agua" this happens because in Spanish rather is careful not to create Cacophony ie for example if we put "La Agua " because as " La " ends in "a" and "Agua" starts with "a" Cacophony occurs this also happens with the copulative "Y" changes in "E"words that begin with "I" or "Hi" and are not diphthongs are changed to "E" for example: "Immense and unimaginable". == > " Inmenso e inimaginable " .
I listen to the sentence at speed, translate what I hear, then check with the slower speed. Sometimes, I must repeat the slow speed several times to get all the words. Then I speak with the recording at slow speed until I can keep up with the recording, and finally try speaking the sentence at speed. There seems to be a definite cadence to speaking different words together.
"Es" translated directly is "is." In Spanish, you can drop the pronoun when it is implied by the verb conjugation. For example, if you say, "Am going to the store," you can tell that the pronoun there must be "I," because you used "am." If you say, "Are going to the store," the pronoun must be "you," because you used "are." You would never drop the pronoun in English, but in Spanish you can.
This is a bit confusing when you are starting out in Spanish, so bear with me.
Es literally means "is". "Es" is a conjugation of the verb sera (to be).
"it" would be translated by either "él" (the accent is important, el = the, él = he or it), or ella.
So, a FULL word-for-word translation of "it is" would be either "él es" or "ella es".
However Spanish is what's called a "pro-drop" language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language) , meaning that they usually drop the pronoun (yo, él, ella, tu, nos, usted, ustedes) from sentences. So although the literal word-for-word translation of "es un aranana" is "is a spider", if you were to translate the meaning of the sentence it would be "it is a spider".
So yes, for all intents and purposes, when you see "es" you can usually translate it as "he is / she is / it is".
Hope I haven't just made that more confusing for you :-)