Between verbs, tenses and moods
By Georgina Palencia.
Since we love Spanish and love teaching it, it seems easy to us. We guarantee we will have fun in class, and learning will be like a game; it is true. As Spanish teachers we strive to make what is difficult, easy.
How is that? Isn’t it really easy to learn? Why do so many school promotions assure and sell the idea that in three months you can be fluent?
Let me tell you something. Being fluent in three months is not possible, learning a lot and even holding dialogues is. I tell you something else, those dialogues, which fill us with satisfaction at the beginning of the process, will not express what is complex about the Spanish system, especially if you are an English speaker. In this article I am going to expose three of those complexities and why.
1. When there are two verbs in Spanish that express one verb in English:
The verb to be is the first we teach at level A1 and the last to fully clarify even at level C2. Yes, it is true, and it is very interesting. We care to tell you this because there are B1 or B2 level students who feel frustrated because even at those levels they make mistakes when using them.
As many of you know, this verb, which is only one in English, has two different forms in Spanish, SER and ESTAR. The student initially has to identify the uses of the verb to be, and then open a new mental box to place in it when the verb to be is ESTAR, leaving only the uses of the verb SER in the original box. And boy, both have different uses and nuances. At the beginning we give more common functions so as not to frighten and build that box and establish autonomy between the two, but later we discover, add and differentiate uses.
Other verbs also require this differentiation into two forms when there is only one in English, for example, the verb to ask, which in Spanish is PEDIR and PREGUNTAR . There is a big difference, we don’t always PREGUNTAMOS and PEDIMOS, but we always SOMOS and ESTAMOS.. So, we use the verbs SER and ESTAR in all our conversations.
2. When a verb tense does not exist in English:
Once the first tenses of the past are known, perfect (I have studied) and indefinite (I studied), the student goes from a colorful spring to a gloomy verbal autumn. Just as the leaves fall in the fall, so does the idea that everything was easy. And it is natural. Both the simple past perfect, also called the indefinite, and the compound, have their almost exact equivalents in English. And I say almost exactly because when we present the imperfect tense (I was studying), the contrast task starts exactly the same as the one you did with the verb to be. I mean the new box.
Everything that the student thought was equivalent between the past indefinite in English it is not in Spanish. Some functions of yours require the imperfect in ours to be expressed.
Yo vivía en Venezuela cuando era niña / I lived in Venezuela when I was a child.
Yo viví en Venezuela hasta el año 2016 / I lived in Venezuela until 2016.
See that in English it is the same time, but in Spanish it is not. And what is, perhaps worse, is that in Spanish some sentences allow the use of one and the other, but even so there is a small nuance of different meaning between them. And that can be even more confusing. Common territory I call it.
3. When a mode is practically non-existent in English:
Let’s talk about the subjunctive. Let’s talk because it is precisely the same phenomenon, the creation of the new box in native English speakers.
I leave you another article talking about how you learn it (Sobre cómo iniciar tu aprendizaje de él te dejo otro artículo)
Until we know you are ready to start learning the subjunctive, we begin to modify structures that you previously created with the indicative, and at which we smiled proudly. And it is because everything has its moment.
Once an important source of vocabulary has been consolidated, simple sentence structures have been sufficiently used, and everything required to be an intermediate B1 student who already feels comfortable in dialogue and understanding the nature of the language being learned has been stored, we present the subjunctive. And this is a big step in your process.
But yes; if before you said: Yo quiero que tú vas conmigo a la fiesta, ahora tendrás que decir Yo quiero que tú vayas conmigo a la fiesta. And so there are countless expressions.
What can we do then? The same as in the previous examples. Go on identifying the particularities of this verbal mode to create an autonomous box with its employment labels, well distinguished from the forms of the indicative.
I think the box idea is useful, what do you think?
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My recommendation is to slowly build these boxes, first introducing morphology (conjugations), then functions, and finally structures and contrasts.
It is complex, yes, but not complicated.
Why is it complex? Because it’s not just about learning a verb with its conjugations depending on the subject and tense, it’s about dissecting your linguistic brain and remodeling it. Just like that.
At www.spanishperfecto we never say that it is easy or that you will do it in three months, or anything like that, we tell you the truth. We say that you are going to expand your mind, and there is nothing metaphorical, it is absolutely literal.
