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The Spanish Subjunctive Explained: How the Subjunctive Works Plus a Mnemonic Trick to Help you Remember When to Use It (The W.E.I.R.D.O. System)

Andrew — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 19:23:27 +0000

I couldn’t find a picture that related to what I was writing about (I always try to do that), in this case the Spanish subjunctive, so here’s a picture of my idea for an anti-gravity device based on a cat with some buttered toast on its head – what do you think?

The subjunctive in Spanish is one of two other moods besides the ‘normal’ Spanish mood (and it is a mood, not a tense) that you’re used to, which is called the indicative mood (in short, it’s used to state things the speaker believes to be facts as opposed to opinions or hypotheticals), and the other one is the imperative mood which is solely used to give commands. The Spanish subjunctive is used with impersonal expressions and expressions of emotion, opinion, doubt, disagreement, denial or volition – essentially, it’s used for anything uncertain or emotional. The indicative is used for expressing things that are objective, truthful, unemotional, and not in doubt. I should also note that the subjunctive, though essential to becoming fluent in Spanish (or even moving beyond the beginner’s level), is note often used and shouldn’t be bothered with until you’re on the tail end of learning beginner’s Spanish (that is you’re just finishing up with A2 on the CEFR scale). If you’re not sure, or would like to learn more about which verb tenses/moods you should focus on depending on your level, please see my article entitled, What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important.

If you wanted to say that the cat is on top the refrigerator, you would just use the regular indicative: “El gato está encima de la nevera”, however, if you wanted to say that the cat would prefer that you not put him on top of the refrigerator, you would use the subjunctive and say: “El gato desea que no lo pongas encima de la nevera”, where “pongas” is the present subjunctive form of “poner“. You’ll notice that the first verb is in the normal indicative mood, whereas it’s the second verb that’s in the subjunctive and that’s how it always is, which brings me to…

Requirements

There are three requirements that usually must be met for the Spanish subjunctive to be needed. These are not always necessary, they’re more like “characteristics that are present 95% of the time”, but as this is an introductory article for people who have never delved into the subjunctive before, that’s good enough for our purposes. They are:

1. Two different subjects

2. A relative pronoun (“que”, “como”, “cual”, “donde”, or “quien”)

3. Two different verbs – the first will always be in the indicative and the second will always be in the subjunctive. The first verb will signal that the second verb needs to be in the subjunctive by the very nature of that first verb and the context it’s used in (it expresses emotion, doubt, etc.).

There must also be two Clauses, though this is an automatic consequence of requiring 2 subjects so it doesn’t get its own rule.

W.E.I.R.D.O.

This is a brilliant little system for figuring out when you need to use the subjunctive in Spanish (I don’t know who originally invented it, but it wasn’t me). Like I said above in the third requirement: the first verb, which is almost always in the indicative, will tell you if the second verb needs to be in the subjunctive or not. As you already know, you’re looking for verbs that express emotion, uncertainty, desire, etc. Well, there’s a nifty little acronym you can use to help you remember all of these with ease. All you have to do is remember to look for W.E.I.R.D.O. verbs:

Wishes
Emotions
Impersonal Expressions
Recommendations
Doubt/Denial
Ojalá

Wishes: This includes all wishes, wants, demands, desires, orders, expectations, and preferences. Examples include things like “Espero que él me llame” which means “I hope that he calls me”, or “Todos quieren que vengas” which means “Everyone wants you to come.”

(note: all subjunctive verbs in these example sentences are bolded)

Verbs in this category that commonly indicate the need for the subjunctive to follow include mandar (to order), insistir (to insist), necesitar (to need), preferir (to prefer), querer (to want), desear (to wish or desire), pedir (to request), etc.

Emotions: Any time someone is expressing the fact that they’re annoyed, angry, happy, sad, scared, surprised, etc. you will almost always see the subjunctive used due to this being considered an expression of emotion. Examples include the above example I gave with the angry cat, or something like: “A Benny le molesta que la gente coma animales aunque ellos son muy sabrosos.” which means “It annoys Benny that people eat animals even though they are very tasty.”

Verbs that commonly fall into this category are alegrarse (to be glad), gustar (to like), encantar (to love in the sense of really liking something), lamentar (to regret), enojar (to be angry), sorprender (to surprise), temer (to fear), quejarse (to complain), and molestar (to annoy).

Impersonal expressions: These express someone’s opinion or judgment on something and are subjective in nature. Examples include things like “Es extraño que el gato esté volando” which means “It’s strange that the cat is flying”, or “Es bueno que hayas decidido darme todo tu dinero” which means “It’s good that you’ve decided to give me all your money.”

Common expressions in this category are things like “es agradable” (it’s nice), “es necesario” (it’s necessary), “es raro” (it’s rare), “no es cierto” (it’s not certain), “es increíble” (it’s incredible), “es malo” (it’s bad), etc.

Recommendations: Whenever someone is recommended, suggested, or told to do something, this falls into the recommendation category. Things like: “Mi doctor recomienda que no beba tanto vodka” which means “My doctor recommends that I not drink so much vodka”, or “Ellos sugieren que no juegues en el tráfico” which means “They suggest that you not play in traffic.”

Verbs commonly seen in this category include aconsejar (to advise), sugerir (to suggest), recomendar (to recommend), rogar (to beg), ordenar (to order), and proponer (to suggest or propose).

Doubt/Denial: Whenever someone wants to express doubt or denial, they use the subjunctive. Examples include things like: “Dudo que tengas un burro morado” which means “I doubt that you have a purple donkey” or perhaps “No creo que él diga la verdad sobre su coleccíon de arbolitos” which means “I don’t believe he’s telling the truth about his shrubbery collection.”

Verbs commonly used to express doubt include dudar (to doubt), creer (to believe), pensar (to think), negar (to deny), “no estar seguro” (to not be sure), suponer (to assume or suppose), etc.

Ojalá: “Ojalá” is an interesting word you’ll hear very frequently in Spanish, particularly Latin American Spanish. It is one of several Spanish words that has Arabic origins. It comes from the Old Spanish oxalá, which comes from the Arabic لو شاء الله (law sha’a Allah) and means something like “if God wills it”. So ojalá means “If only…” or “I hope to God…” or, basically, “I really hope…”, so you can see why it requires the subjunctive because it’s expressing a desire in a special sort of way. Examples include things like: “Ojalá que lleguen pronto las mujeres desnudas”, meaning “I hope to God the naked women arrive soon”, or “Ojalá que no me dispare en el culo” which means “I really hope he doesn’t shoot me in the ass”.

Bonus: Hypotheticals

To describe hypothetical situations Spanish speakers frequently employ the subjunctive, often in conjunction with the expression, “como si”, e.g. “como si fuera”, “como si estuviera”, etc. This makes perfect sense as the subjunctive is used to describe, generally, something that doesn’t exist or isn’t the case but maybe could be. Here are some examples from real-life contexts:

Deberían tratarla como si fuera sagrada.

“They should treat it as if it were sacred.”

Me gritaba como si fuera niño.

“She’s was yelling at me as if I were a child.”

Siento como si estuviera dormida aquí.

“I feel as if I were asleep here.”

Estás mirándome como si estuviera loco.

“You’re looking at me as if I were crazy.”

Searching Reverso Context for “como si” yields tons of examples of this in practice, definitely have a look for more examples of this phenomenon in the wild.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post The Spanish Subjunctive Explained: How the Subjunctive Works Plus a Mnemonic Trick to Help you Remember When to Use It (The W.E.I.R.D.O. System) appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

When to Say “Yo” (“I”) in Spanish (and Why Native Speakers Almost Never Do)

Andrew — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 06:41:58 +0000

Why

It’s for the same reason you can just point at a cow and say “Cow!” instead of “There is a cow over there and I want you to look at it!”. It’s for the same reason that when someone asks you if you would like fries with that you can just say “Yes, please” and not “Yes I would like fries with that”. That reason is: they don’t need to.

The reason you don’t need to is that in Spanish, as in English, the verbs sometimes change based on the subject and time that the action occurred. For example, the verb “to go” changes from “go” to “went” when you talk about the past instead of the present (“I go”, “I went”). The verb “is” changes based on who or what “is”, e.g. it’s “I am” but “you are” – “is” changes to “am” and then to “are”. When the subject is “I”, that is to say the first person, the forms the verbs are in are almost always unique in the present tense (the most common tense), and they are also unique in some (but not all) other tenses as well. This means most of the time you don’t need to say “I” because the verb immediately tells you that the subject is I. Have a look at a few examples:

It needs to be noted that the way you say “I” in Spanish is “Yo”.

“I have two cars” = “Yo tengo dos autos”. The verb (in its infinitive form) here is “tener”, which means to have. But it’s only ever “tengo” when the subject is “I”, so you never need to say “Yo” (which means “I”, remember). The way a native speaker would say this is actually “Tengo dos autos”.
“I had two cars” = “Yo tuve dos autos”. Again, the “Yo” is unnecessary because the only time “tuve” is ever used is to mean “I had”, as in this example. A native Spanish speaker would always just say “Tuve dos autos”.

Exceptions (when to say “yo” in Spanish)

There are some other verb forms (conjugations, is the technical term) for use with the subject “I” that aren’t unique, specifically what’s known as the imperfect, which is a different way of talking about the past in Spanish that, to put it very briefly, implies that the action that was happening in the past still is or was ongoing until it was interrupted. For example, you could say “Yo tenía dos autos”, which means “I had, and still have, two cars”, but the way you would say “He had, and still has, two cars” is “Él tenía dos autos” – notice how the verb “tener”, here in the form “tenía”, is the same despite the change in subject. It’s not unique for the subject “I”. This means that when using the imperfect, sometimes you will need to say “Yo”…but not usually.

Why don’t native Spanish speakers still not say “Yo” in most cases where the imperfect is used despite the risk of confusion since “Tenía dos autos” could hypothetically means either “I had, and still have, two cars”, or “He had, and still has, two cars”, or “She had, and still has, two cars”? Because it’s usually very clear from the context which one is meant. If you feel that it might not be clear, you should include “Yo” before the verb.

They will additionally say “Yo” when they want to emphasize that the subject is themselves. For example, two native speakers might have the following exchange:

Speaker 1: “¿Quien tiene conejo morado?” – “Who has the purple rabbit?”

Speaker 2: “Lo tengo” – “I have it”

Speaker 1: ” Pero pensaba que era Alejandro que lo tenía.” – But I thought it was Alejandro who had it.

Speaker 2: “No, lo tengo yo.” (note the use of “yo” here!) – “No, I have it”.

Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be a purple rabbit specifically, but you get the idea. In English we do this by using vocal intonation to emphasize the word “I”, in Spanish they do it just by using the word “I” at all. The reason this works as emphasis is because “I” isn’t strictly necessary here so if you’re using it then it must be because you want to emphasize that you are the subject. You’re the one with the dumb damn purple rabbit, not flippin’ Alejandro.

In summary, your two exceptions are:

The odd occasion where the use of the subject “I” does not result in the verb being unique and, additionally, the context doesn’t make it completely clear who the subject is and therefore the possibility for confusion exists.
The speaker wants to emphasize that they are the subject. Purple rabbit.

If you’re learning Spanish…

There’s a great service called Yabla (this is my review of them) that takes popular media like TV shows and short video clips in the language you’re learning (they offer several) and embeds the video in a special platform specifically designed to help students learning that language do so from that video. You get subtitles in both the language spoke and your native language, you can click on any word in the subtitles to see a definition of it and have it automatically added to your flashcards they provide for you to review later what you learned, you can have quizes and games based on the language used in the video, etc. It’s really good, check out their site here or, again, you can see my review of them here.

Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format. If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts. My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

The post When to Say “Yo” (“I”) in Spanish (and Why Native Speakers Almost Never Do) appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

A Brief Guide to Regional Variation of the Forms of Address (Tú, Vos, Usted) in Spanish

Andrew — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 05:08:29 +0000

This is actually an excerpt from a longer article I’m currently in the process of writing (should be out in a few weeks, when it is I’ll edit this) about Spanish pronouns. It’s just a brief guide to the form of address used in each country (regional variation, which one is used when, weird combinations of pronouns and verb conjugations, etc.).

Tú, usted, vosotros, vos, and ustedes all correspond to “you” in English. They are sometimes interchangeable but not usually (e.g. you can use either “tú” or “vos” a lot of the time in places where “vos” is in common use). Each one has a specific context in which that specific pronoun, and usually only that specific pronoun, is appropriate. It gets worse: it varies by country. It gets worse still: it frequently varies by region within a certain country (e.g. frequently when “usted” would be used in Bogotá, Colombia, “vos” would be used in Medellín, Colombia). Now, odds are you do not need to know which pronoun is used, and when, for every single Spanish-speaking region of the world. The following information is for you to decide which pronouns to focus on studying and the contexts you want to train yourself to use them in.

Let’s begin.

I should quickly note that there are several different forms of voseo (ways to use “vos”), typically grouped into types (1, 2, and 3), such as using the pronoun “vos” with verbs conjugated for “tú” and vice-versa. Don’t worry too much about them here, I’ll go into more detail in the section on “vos”.

Additional note that I’ve just realized is necessary: when I say that “tú” or “vos” is used, without further explanation, I mean that the pronoun itself is used normally with its normal verb conjugations, e.g. “they use tú” means they say “tú hablas” or “tú andas”, that is the verbs are conjugated to match the pronoun. When it’s some weird combination of one pronoun and verbs conjugated for a different pronoun (not uncommon) I’ll say so.

Argentina

“Vos” is predominant regardless of context, age, or social status. It is of the Type 3 variety. The pronoun “tú” is virtually unused here except in the very northern part of the country. However, what some of them do in the subjunctive mood (and only in the subjunctive, note) is use the pronoun “vos” along with the “tú” conjugation of the verb with emphasis shifted to the final syllable, e.g. “Vos hablás”, “Vos caminás”, etc. This makes learning this particular type of voseo for the subjunctive very easy if you already know how to conjugate verbs for “tú” (yes, just say “vos” instead of “tú” and then add an accent to the final vowel). Wikipedia tells me this is only done by those less educated and of lower class, whereas those of the middle and upper classes simply use the normal “tú” conjugation of the verb but with the pronoun “vos”, e.g. “vos hablas” (not “vos hablás”), “vos caminas” (not “vos caminás”), etc. The specific language I’m referring to is this:

Para el subjuntivo, existe variación social.

“En el español rioplatense, la forma considerada estándar y empleada en los medios escritos y por las capas medias y altas de la sociedad, es idéntica a la que se emplea para tú; en algunos casos, principalmente en los estratos sociales más bajos y de menor instrucción, el acento se desplaza a la última sílaba por asimilación a la forma de indicativo (que tú comas -> que vos comás, que tú digas -> que vos digás), perdiéndose también la alternancia vocálica (que tú pierdas -> que vos perdás). En algún caso, la forma resultante no es idéntica a la del indicativo del verbo (que tú duermas -> que vos durmás, no durmás).”

From: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voseo#Voseo_dialectal_americano

“Vos” is used in both written and spoken language. If you’re going to Argentina you absolutely must learn this type of voseo and you should prioritize your study of its use over that of “usted” or “tú”. As in all other countries “usted” is used in situations formal enough to require it, but in Argentina those are very rare and you’re extremely unlikely to encounter them.

Bolivia

Interestingly, the information I’ve found says that “tú” is used amongst the more educated classes whereas everyone else uses “vos” (Type 1). Yes, you can find geographical distribution information that goes into a lot more detail but I suspect you’ll find it roughly matches the previously mentioned socioeconomic demographic, that is it’s following the people, the people aren’t conforming their speech to abstract geographical boundaries. Who you’re speaking to here is what matters, not where (it’s just that you’re more likely to find certain people in certain places than others). If you’re in an upscale restaurant in Santa Cruz (largest city) where all the clients are using “tú” but your server is from a more rural area, probably they’ll address you as “vos” and be more comfortable if you do the same with them.

Chile

“Vos” (Type 3) is more common but, as in Bolivia, “tú” has a kind of prestige to it and as such is used by the upper classes and those with more formal education. The most common form of address is with the pronoun “tú” but with the verbs conjugated for “vos”.

Colombia

I’m in Colombia at the moment and it’s a bit interesting because the popular form of address is currently in transition. It used to be almost entirely “usted” for everything and everyone, and there are a lot of people (usually 35-40 and up) who still do that. However, “vos” is used in some parts (principally in and around Medellín and the Pacific coast in the South) and is of Type 1. “Tú” is the most common form of address in the northern coastal regions (e.g. Cartagena, Santa Marta), but “usted” is probably the predominate form of address in Colombia in general, though I’ve found “tú” more common amongst younger people. Definitely use “usted” with people significantly older than you, of significantly higher status, or in formal situations. Do not call someone’s grandmother “tú” (it’s going to sound odd to them even if you’re the same age and status because, as I said, people of that age are still very much in the habit of referring to everyone as “usted” regardless of circumstances). I’ve been in Bogota three weeks now and have found most of those under 30 use “tú”, much older than that and they’ll tend towards “usted”. I’ve never heard anyone in Bogota use “vos”.

Costa Rica

Use of “usted” is very common here, it’s the normal form of address for people not close to you and so you can easily default to it without worry of being thought overly formal. “Vos” is the informal form of address and is of Type 3. “Tú” is seldom used. Additionally, it’s frequently seen as “pretentious”, so I’d especially advise you to avoid using it there until you get some input from the locals on the matter.

Cuba

“Tú” is the predominate form of address here, although “vos” is used in certain areas, mainly in the more rural countryside and mountains. The exception to this is Camagüey where “vos” is still the main form of address (Type 1). What’s interesting is that this is the one area outside of Spain where you’ll hear the pronouns “vosotros” and “os” still used, though without the corresponding verb conjugations (they use the voseo conjugation).

Dominican Republic

“Tú” is used between people of roughly the same age and status, otherwise “usted” is used to address those significantly older or in a position of authority (teacher, superior at work, etc.).

Ecuador

“Tú” is used almost exclusively here with the exception of the Northern Sierra, Emerald Coast, and Central regions where “vos” will be used as the pronoun but the verb will be conjugated for “tú” (this is Type 2). So regardless of where you’re going you really only need to know the verb conjugations for “tú”.

El Salvador

They use all three (“tú”, “usted”, and “vos”) depending on the context but they don’t conjugate the verbs for “vos” when they use it, instead they use the “tú” form of the verb with the pronoun “vos” (this is Type 3). “Tú” is considered for use in situations of “intermediate formality”, “vos” for informal situations, and “usted” for the most formal ones.

Equatorial Guinea

Sparse information on this one but as best I can tell they mostly just use “tú”.

Gibraltar

See: Spain.

Guatemala

“Vos” (Type 3) is generally used, probably your safest overall option. “Usted” is used as it normally is: with people significantly older or in positions of authority. “Tú” is used between women (sometimes, when they’re friendly with each other), never between men (it’s seen as effeminate and a possible sign of homosexuality).

Honduras

“Vos” (Type 3) for normal, informal conversations, “tú” for slightly more formal ones, and then “usted” for the most formal situations. As with Guatemala, men generally don’t use “tú” with each other.

Mexico

“Tú” is by far the most common form of address. Exceptions include the state of Chiapas and the rural areas of Tabasco, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo where “vos” (Type 3) is primarily used. Members of certain indigenous populations use the pronoun “tú” but with verbs conjugated for “vos” – this is generally considered uneducated low-class.

Nicaragua

“Tú” is used here in more formal situations, though very formal ones require “usted”. “Vos” is the primary form of address (Type 3).

Panama

“Tú” is primarily used, “usted” for very formal situations, and “vos” is rarely heard, except in the extreme west on the border with Costa Rica where it’s Type 1 (also in this area people may alternate “tú” and “vos” while maintaining the “vos” conjugation of the verbs, but only in the present indicative and imperative – this is considered archaic and “rustic” and is fading out).

Paraguay

“Vos” is used almost universally here, no exceptions that I can find.

Peru

Another mess, but only in certain minority regions of the country. Mostly “tú” is used informally and “usted” is used formally and that’s that’. However, “vos” is used in the very north and south. In the north they use the pronoun “tú” with the verb conjugated for “vos” (Type 2). In the south they do the same thing but alternate the pronoun between “tú” and “vos”, but only in the imperative and indicative. In all other forms they just use “tú” normally. “Usted” is used in formal situations as usual. The oddball here is Arequipa where “vos” is used normally.

Puerto Rico

“Tú” is predominant for informal address, “usted” for formal address. The exception is in Fajardo in the far east where “vos” is used (I can’t find information on the type).

Spain

“Tú” is overwhelmingly predominant. It’s used almost always except in formal situations where “usted” is used instead. In interviews on TV, guests are addressed using “usted”, the hosts/anchors address the audience as “ustedes”. If someone is much older than you or it’s a formal situation with apparent status difference (you’re in court talking to the judge), you should probably use “usted”. Other than that, it’s “tú” for just about everything. However, this is also the only Spanish-speaking country where “vosotros” and its corresponding conjugations are widely used, and I do mean widely. Yes, you have to learn how to use “vosotros” properly if you’re going to speak Iberian Spanish, if you want to understand what people are saying. It’s by far the most common way to refer to multiple people in the first person (it’s that or “ustedes”, and “usted” is not often used in Spain). “Usted” is used, it’s just reserved for fairly formal occasions and those don’t happen often for most people. I’m basing this off my personal experience of having lived there (in Zaragoza) for three months in 2015.

Uruguay

“Vos” and the corresponding verb conjugations are accepted without reserve everywhere and amongst all social classes, and their usage mirrors that of Argentina (see “Argentina” above). That said, it’s common to hear the pronoun “tú” used but with verbs conjugated for “vos” and this is seen as having a certain prestige to it. It’s common to hear “tú” used with its matching verb conjugation in the interior of the country, e.g. Rocha, Rivera and departments surrounding Brazil near the Tacuarembó River.

Venezuela

“Tú” is the most common daily form of address with “usted”, of course, being used in more formal situations. “Vos” is used in the northwest of the country in areas around Lake Maracaibo and the Venezuelan Andes. There are two types but from what I’ve read you really only need to concern yourself with one, the “voseo zuliano” (the other, “voseo andino” is a minority dialect and quickly on the way out), which is essentially Type 1. Read more about this (in Spanish) here.

Here’s a visual guide to voseo distribution I stole (it’s creative commons, it’s fine) from Wikipedia:

Here’s a very useful tip that will help countless beginners save face and avoid embarrassing themselves or insulting someone else. This applies everywhere in all situations: “usted” is always safe. You’ll never insult or offend someone by addressing them as “usted”. It might sound odd, stuffy, or overly formal, but you’ll never offend or talk down to someone by calling them “usted”. If you’re 20 years old and speaking to a fellow 20 year-old student in Spain, and you call them “usted”, you’ll probably get a bit of a giggle out of them, but you won’t offend them. If you’re 20 years old and, well just about anywhere (even Spain), and you don’t refer to a 70 year-old with whom you’re not intimately familiar (i.e. not your grandmother) as “usted”, that’s…not good. It’s not a big deal and you’ll likely be given a pass due to your non-native speaker status, but it’s still best we avoid that if we can.

Further Reading and Additional Resources

On Forms of Address and Their Variance (tuteo, ustedeo, voseo, etc.)

The Spanish-language Wikipedia article on Voseo is where I got most of my information on this, check it out if you speak Spanish. The English version is pretty good but not quite as detailed or up to date.

Forms of Address in the Spanish of the Americas – This is an academic text, sometimes out of print and always expensive (~$100US depending on which version you buy). If you really want advanced, detailed research on the matter from a reputable source, I’d consider this. There’s an e-book version available in the Google Play Store for about $88.

Also, please consider having a look at a similar article I wrote called, What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important, it does address tengentally forms of address, that is how often you’ll use which.

Ok, I hope that helps some people, and the best way you can help me is to tell me what I screwed up in the comments below: if you saw something above you disagree with, tell me. It’s perfectly welcome; it doesn’t mean I’ll agree and change the article, but I will look into it. Also…if you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post A Brief Guide to Regional Variation of the Forms of Address (Tú, Vos, Usted) in Spanish appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

List of Best YouTube Spanish Lessons – Short Description and Sample Video Included

Andrew — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 19:48:22 +0000

Ok, I’m going to start a list of YouTube Spanish lessons I recommend, that is to say YouTube channels that teach Spanish and, in my opinion, do a good job of it. This list will be continually updated and maintained (as it will need to be in order to remain current and useful) in the same vein as my list of websites where you can watch Spanish videos that have Spanish subtitles (or transcripts). That list was first published back in 2012 but has been updated many times since then to include new sites and remove old, defunct ones. This will work the same way.

These will be channels specifically designed and intended to teach Spanish or at least to help people learn Spanish. This includes not just

channels directly teaching Spanish (e.g. grammar lessons) but also those where the Spanish is intentionally spoken in such a way as to make it easier for non-native speakers to understand (slower than normal, avoids complex, less common words and syntax).

These channels will not be ordered in any particular way. I’ll provide a short description and reason for why I like them along with a single video from their channel that I think does a good job of representing them. Let’s get started.

Señor Jordan

This is a long-time favorite of mine, and what’s nice is that he’s been around forever and still consistently puts out videos. The amount of content he offers is enormous. He’s a Spanish teacher (no idea what level, I’m guessing middle/high school) who just makes videos over his summer break. He’s been doing this so long (since 2007) that at this point he’s covered the overwhelming majority of commonly used Spanish. Nearly any topic you’d like to learn about, he’s got a video on it.

He picks a single topic for each video and does an excellent job of explaining it. His explanations are clear, slow, and include lots of examples and visuals to help you remember the material. Check out his video below about the present perfect in Spanish to see what I mean:

Since YouTube’s not great at organizing large volumes of videos like what he has, I strongly recommend you go to this page on his website where he’s done it for you. The videos are primarily organized by level – for the student – such as “basics”, “advanced”, and “more advanced”. Oh, and I should point out that his Spanish is almost entirely Latin American (principally Mexican), where that makes a difference (rarely, except in pronunciation). If you’re a beginner it doesn’t much matter which dialect you start with because the basics of a language are almost completely the same throughout the various dialects (if there were major differences then they wouldn’t be two dialects of one language but two different languages altogether).

Spanish Sessions

She’s a teacher at a Spanish school (that is, a school for foreigners that teaches Spanish) in Madrid. She’s a native speaker (unlike Señor Jordan), and obviously the Spanish she teaches is the Iberian dialect, specifically that from Madrid. What I like about her is that she not only speaks slowly and clearly, and provides Spanish subtitles for all her videos, but especially that she makes most of her videos out of lessons with actual students. That is, you learn a concept along with the student she’s teaching who is also learning it, that way the tempo of the instruction is matched to that of such a student, plus they tend to ask the same questions and have the same problems that you likely will have.

Check out her video about tan/tanto to see what I mean:

SpanishDict

Yes, the dictionary. They have their own YouTube channel where they’ve put a lot of fairly high-quality content, mostly about various grammar concepts and common phrases. I will warn you that most of their videos are fairly old and as such the audio and video quality is not so great, but the explanations are pretty good. The below video illustrates this (yeah, that’s 240p):

Butterfly Spanish

These are much more recent/modern, and very well-made. God does she love her whiteboard, though (not criticizing). She’s a native speaker, Latin American, though I’m not sure from which country. She’s covered a ton of topics already, explains things slowly and comprehensively, and does so mostly in English (though I notice that subtitles are provided for when she speaks Spanish! excellent!). Check out this video on describing how you feel in Spanish:

SpanishWithPaul

He’s a native English speaker living in (I believe) Spain at the moment. He makes fairly long videos (30-45mins) explaining various Spanish concepts, principally using very simple, Powerpoint-like graphics. He does a good job of explaining things though and people seem to think he’s a very good teacher. See his explanation of the preterite tense in Spanish below for an example:

SpanishPod101

Yes, the professional podcasting company. For what it’s worth, by the way, I think their podcast lessons are excellent and it’s absolutely worth the money to get a membership.

They tend to focus more on how to say various common phrases, expressions, how to talk about certain subjects and events (New Years, your birthday, vegetables, vehicles, “kitchen vocabulary”, etc.), than grammar – if you’re looking for YouTube Spanish lessons for beginners this is an excellent choice. This is what some people prefer so it’s a nice change from most of the rest that do largely focus on grammar. Check out their video below on fruit to see what I mean:

Professor Jason

I’ve just spent nearly an hour watching this guy’s videos and I’m pretty impressed overall, but I will add the significant forewarning that his style definitely will not suit some people: it’s very grammar-oriented and he presumes that you already know all the relevant grammatical terminology that he uses (e.g. “dependent clause”, “relative pronoun”, “modal verb”, “imperfect tense”, etc.).

Other than that, I must say that he does an excellent and thorough job of explaining the concepts that he does. His videos tend to be long (20-40 minutes) but given what they’re about that’s a good thing, even a necessary one I would say. The concepts he discusses are complex and cover a lot of ground, they need time and plenty of examples to be explained properly. When you finish one of his videos you’ll feel like you not only have a good understanding of the topic discussed but also like it’s had a chance to sink in fairly well, not like it wasn’t just crammed down your throat as quickly as possible.

Check out his video below about the differences between aquí, acá, allí, and allá for an excellent example of what I’m talking about: it’s thirty minutes long but is probably the best video you can find online about this topic.

Español en Episodios

This is one of those series like Destinos or Extr@ that’s formulated to help people learn Spanish, so they speak slowly and clearly and at a level slightly below what adults normally would. They do seem to offer a transcription they’ll email you, but they want a small donation for it. Have a look at the first episode:

Spanishland School

This is a channel run by a Colombian lady who operates a Spanish school specifically for intermediate and advanced students. The videos are very well done with explanations in English, e.g. the following about Colombian slang:

Dreaming Spanish

This is a really interesting channel, his method reminds me of that of Ramses who used to do a blog called “Spanish Only”: he really emphasizes listening first, that is to say a sort of “silent period”, as it’s been called, where you just listen to the language and don’t try to speak it. Whether you agree with this or not (I don’t), you should really give his channel a shot because he speaks very clearly and only somewhat slowly (not so much that it’s silly or annoying). The topics of his videos range from language-learning advice and techniques to history to scenarios such as how to deal with a taxi in Spanish.

The sample video is below but if you’re interested in learning more about this method, here’s a blog post on it by a redditor who commented on the submission of this channel in the /r/LanguageLearning subreddit (highly recommended if you’re on reddit).

An excllent Spanish course based on video and audio lessons, focuses on teaching you to speak conversational Spanish…

I really recommend you check out my review of Rocket Spanish, it might be a good choice for you considering the article you just finished reading: it’s quite affordable given what you get, it’s online so you just log into their site from your web browser and start the lessons, the lessons are based on videos and audio recordings of native speakers who teach natural, everyday, conversational Spanish, not some boring, technical textbook. I also talk about who it isn’t for, what some of its problems are, etc., so if you’re considering it and want a critical review please have a look.

Additional Resources and Further Reading

I have a whole category devoted to learning Spanish from YouTube you should check out, it’s full of posts you’ll find useful: Learn Spanish on YouTube: Recommended Channels, How to Do It, Lessons Based on YouTube Videos.

I particularly recommend you have a look at the following related posts:

Also see:

11 Awesome Channels to Learn Spanish on YouTube, by FluentU (good blog, excellent language-learning service, check it out).

The 17 Best YouTube Channels to Learn Spanish. Solid list, a few that are present here and few that aren’t.

Ok, hope that was helpful to you all. Please, if you know of a YouTube channel that wasn’t on this list and you think it should be, tell me in the comments! I’m happy to check it out and add it to my list of YouTube Spanish lessons if I think it ought to be here. Also… If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post List of Best YouTube Spanish Lessons – Short Description and Sample Video Included appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important

Andrew — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 23:45:05 +0000

First of all, it’s “which Spanish verb tenses…”, not “what Spanish verb tenses…”, but Google tells me the first one is what people are searching for, so that’s what the title is. Now that that’s out of the way…

I’m going to cover 3 things in this article today:

Why the Spanish verb conjugations are so important, why you should start learning them immediately, and why you should devote a good deal of time to doing so.
Which ones are the most important, which ones you should focus on in the beginning, and in what order (I rank them in order of importance primarily based on how frequently they’re used in popular speech and writing by native speakers).
Recommendations of tools, websites, and resources you can use to help you learn Spanish verb conjugations (this is at the bottom and arguably the most valuable part of this article if you’re ready to dive right in, don’t miss it!).

Part 1: Why Spanish verb tenses (and moods! yes, there’s a difference) are so important and why it’s beneficial to you to devote a lot of time to learning them

This is something I’ve been thinking about and saying to certain people for a while and now I’m going to come out and say it publicly:

Being able to properly conjugate verbs is the key to learning the Spanish language. It’s also 80% of the hard work. Master it and you’re most of the way there already, the rest are things that are relatively minor by themselves and easily learned.

They’re that important. I’m learning German right now and the equivalent concept in that language are the cases – learn those and you’ve got 80% of the hard work out of the way (plus they are absolutely key to the language itself). Master the conjugation of verbs in Spanish and all you’ve got left is a little bit of additional, relatively simple, grammar and syntax, a bunch of vocabulary, and that’s it. The vocabulary can be tedious to learn, it can take a while, yes, but it’s not difficult to understand at all (unlike the verb conjugation system), it’s just the definition of a word that you have to remember, that’s it.

Now, note that I did not say that the verbs or verb conjugation were 80% of the Spanish language or even most of it, I said they were 80% of the hard part. By sheer volume verbs don’t make up the majority of the language or the grammar, no, but I do think they’re most of what’s difficult for people learning the language.

The concept of verb conjugation in Spanish is the hardest part of learning the language in my opinion, it’s learning how to conjugate the various verbs, what each tense/mood means, how and when to use which tense/mood, and then learning all the irregular verbs in addition to that. It’s a big deal; it’s a big, complex, nonsensical, discombobulated…thing, that is also, much to the beginning learner’s chagrin, extremely important, absolutely integral, to the language. Yes, you have to learn it, yes it’s going to be hard and it’s going to suck. Want to tackle it, get it handled, get it out of the way, and start being able to adroitly use the Spanish language correctly with fluency? Then let’s do that, let’s get going.

How should I learn the Spanish verb tenses?

One at a time, slowly, from the most essential and commonly used ones to the least so, in order.

That’s how I recommend you do it. As many of you know, if you’re familiar with my work, I place great value on using popular media in the language you’re trying to learn in order to learn that language – TV shows, movies, cartoons, books, news articles, etc. (I even wrote a book about it!). The sooner you can learn just enough Spanish (and it won’t take much) to at least get started in understanding those sources and talking to people in Spanish via language exchanges, the better. Once you can start doing those things the rate at which you will be learning Spanish will increase significantly.

I recommend that you already know at least a little bit of the language first before you start in on the Spanish TV shows and music and what-not (you don’t absolutely have to but it makes it a hell of a lot easier), just enough so that you have a clue as to what you’re looking at or listening to – “Ok, that’s a verb, that’s a noun, that word means ‘the’, that word means ‘an'”, etc. – and although you might not know what any particular verb means, more importantly you do know what tense most of them are conjugated in, what that tense means, and why it’s conjugated that way.

If you’ve got this very basic level of competency down (takes a couple weeks max), you can then use that as a jumping off point to dive into the ocean of Spanish-language media out there (TV shows, comics, etc.) and then start rapidly learning enormous amounts of Spanish from those and applying what you’ve learned by using it to talk to native speakers. Get it?

Part 2: Ok, so which Spanish verb conjugations do I need to learn and in what order?

What do I mean by “which”? I mean there are a lot of verb tenses and moods, as they’re called, in Spanish that are rarely used and as such if you’re a beginning or intermediate learner you’re really far better off not spending any time on them (initially – I’m not saying don’t learn them at all) and instead focusing on the ones that are commonly used today by native speakers in speech and print. This is just like my advice to first learn the most commonly used words in Spanish when you’re working on your vocabulary. So here we go, in order…

Level 1, for complete beginners:

Learn the Present Tense of regular verbs and the most important irregular verbs (ser, ver, etc.)

That’s it. One tense, and one tense only, please. Why?

Two reasons:

You’ll have your hands full enough with this: you’ve got 3 completely different conjugation tables to learn of 6 conjugations each (-ar verbs, -er verbs, and -ir verbs) which comes out to a total of 18 different words/endings to memorize, plus the 6-word present tense conjugation tables for each of the irregular verbs you decide to learn (I’ll give you a list at the end of this article, it’ll be short). So that’s already something like 40-80 words and endings to memorize depending on how many irregulars you throw in.
The present tense is by far the most important, the most common, the most versatile, and consequently the most useful. It’s what you need to learn first. You can do so much with just this one tense – yes, sometimes there are better and more common ways to express something using another verb tense but the point is that using the present tense to do it will work, will be grammatically correct, and most importantly people will understand you and that’s what matters: communicating with native speakers in Spanish, right?

Level 2, for beginners who already know the present tense fairly well, know a few dozen of the most common verbs, and know essential definite/indefinite articles (“el/la” means “the”, “un/una” means “a/an”, etc.):

Learn the Preterite and Imperfect Tenses of regular and the most common irregular verbs

What I mean by this type of beginner is someone who’s still a beginner but not completely so: you can understand very basic Spanish sentences, e.g. “Yo quiero agua” (I want some water) or “¿Cómo te llamas?” (What’s your name?) and you’re already pretty familiar with the present tense and can generally use it and understand verbs conjugated in it without too much trouble. This would probably be somebody with a couple weeks’ to a month’s worth of instruction/study.

Now is where you learn the first half of how to speak about things in the past in Spanish: you’ll learn the two past tenses – preterite and imperfect – what they mean, and how to choose the right one. Level 3 is where you’ll learn the second half of this.

Level 3, for intermediate-beginners who understand most Spanish verb tenses covered in levels 1 & 2 above:

Learn how to use the compound tenses in Spanish as well as how to form the past participles of regular verbs and the most important irregular ones

This is the second half of how you speak about things in the past in Spanish, and yes it is very common (all three ways are, so yes you need to learn all three).

The compound tenses are generally merely this: have or had + past participle (sometimes it’s “have been” or “had been” + past participle). For example, “I have already washed the dishes”, “You had already left when he called”, or “I have been waiting three hours). That’s it, simple.

The way they do this in Spanish is very similar to English, it’s just the Spanish verb “haber” (which means “to have”) + the past participle of a verb. Now, “haber” can be conjugated differently in order to impart different meaning, and it is (sorry) irregular, so you’ll have to learn its conjugation. I left it off my list of the most important irregular verbs below because I didn’t want to make you bother with it until you got to this point since it’s rarely ever used for anything other than this (forming compound tenses) and a few common expressions (“hay que”) you can treat individually, plus it’s basically getting its own section here.

Learning how to form the past participle is relatively very easy, by the way, not a big deal at all. It’s the easy part of this.

Level 4, for advanced beginners who have covered all material in previous levels:

Learn the conditional and future tenses along with the imperative mood

This is relatively minor, sort of just a bit of mopping up we can do before we get to biggest nasty of them all (the subjunctive). The conditional and future are how you express that you would or will do something, e.g. “I would be glad to fly to your home and teach you Spanish if you would pay me a million dollars”, or “I will be in Spain this fall”. The conditional indicates that you will do something in the future if a certain condition (hence the term) is met, and the future indicates that you will do something regardless (without conditions).

The imperative mood is what many of you know as the “command form”, that is how you give a command or order, how you tell somebody to do something, e.g. “Bring me the book that’s on the table, please.” This, like the conditional and future tenses, is relatively simple and easy to learn, it’s just a matter of getting around to and doing it, and it simply isn’t warranted in my opinion until you have all the previous stuff out of the way because these aren’t used as much as the preceding tenses.

Level 5, for advanced beginners who know all the previous material and really need just this to tip them over the edge into “Intermediate” territory:

Learn the Subjunctive Mood

Oh yes. It’s this. “Intermediate level” in Spanish (in terms of a student’s ability), in my opinion, is where you’ve got the issue of verb conjugation down and pretty well settled and now you’re working on other minor grammatical and syntactical issues, less common vocabulary, and speeding up your listening comprehension and speaking abilities (meaning that you’re practicing listening and speaking such that you can understand and properly speak faster and faster Spanish until you get to native-level competency in these areas). If you don’t have the subjunctive down, you’re not intermediate, not yet.

Plan to spend a bit of time on this one. It’s not so much that there’s so much information/material you need to learn, it’s that you need to give yourself time to process and understand a mostly foreign grammatical concept, a way of speaking that you’ve rarely ever used before. Really, you’re just not used to this…concept, this way of communicating (it’s very alien feeling to most students), and in my experience it takes English speakers a while to really “get” this.

I have a good basic introduction article to it, called The Spanish Subjunctive Explained + W.E.I.R.D.O System (awesome little mnemonic device for dealing with the subjunctive in Spanish), if you’re interested in getting started right away.

List of the Most Important Irregular Spanish Verbs

Here’s my list of what I think are the 11 must-learn irregular verbs that beginners absolutely have to know and have to know how to conjugate (which tenses/moods you need to learn depend on what level you’re at as per above). I mostly took these from here, that’s an up-to-date list based on solid, modern data. Each one links to its definition on SpanishDict (which links to its conjugation table, just click “Conjugation” at the top to the right of “Dictionary”):

Part 3: Useful Resources to Learn Spanish Verb Tenses

The best course I know of that will help you learn how to conjugate Spanish verbs is Rocket Spanish, please consider checking out my Rocket Spanish review here – it’s not all positive and I cover not only who I think the course is good for but also who I think it’s not good for (this may be you, have a look before you consider giving them your money). Speaking of money, I should note that it’s really quite reasonably priced compared to similar courses, you’re looking at less than $100 for a comprehensive video/audio Spanish course.
A great free website is Conjugemos that uses a simple but effective interactive quiz with countdown timer where you have to fill in the blank with the correct verb conjugation for the verb given to help you review (they also include verb charts if you don’t already know the tense/mood in question).
In terms of references just to look up the conjugation of a verb, I personally use and recommend SpanishDict and the RAE Dictionary. The RAE site is entirely in Spanish, so it’s more for intermediate/advanced students, and I only tend to use it because at this point I prefer definitions in Spanish for Spanish words that I’m looking up as opposed to an English translation, and then when the word I look up happens to be a verb it’s easier for me to just click the the “Conjugar” button at the top (e.g. see “ver”) than opening a separate tab to navigate to a separate site in order to get that verb’s conjugation (why would I do that?). So I’m not particularly recommending one over the other, if you tend to prefer English definitions then just use SpanishDict’s conjugator, if you prefer Spanish definitions then I recommend the RAE’s dictionary and oh by the way they have a conjugator there on-site, just click the little blue button when you look up a verb. That’s all.
A good introductory video is one called Overview of Spanish Verb Tenses, Conjugations, and Uses by Professor Jason on YouTube.

Also be sure to check out my post, A Brief Guide to Regional Variation of the Forms of Address (Tú, Vos, Usted) in Spanish, it’s not specificaly about verbs but it addresses how their conjugation can change depending on which form of address you use, which is dictated by where you are and who you’re talking to.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Para qué vs. Por qué – The difference explained and when to use each

Andrew — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:40:15 +0000

I was just watching one of my favorite Spanish-language movies, Maria Full of Grace, which is fantastic for learning Spanish, by the way (because you can turn on English or Spanish subtitles and the script is available online), and I noticed they would use the expression “para qué” about as often as “por qué”. I knew they were nearly the same, and the context seemed to indicate so, but I thought “well, there has to be a difference, otherwise why would they bother using one instead of the other?” So I did a bit of research and here’s what I found out.

The difference

They can both mean “why”, as in when translated into English they will both tend to be translated into that specific word, however…a good translator won’t do that, because “para qué” doesn’t really exactly mean “why”, or just “why”, at least. What it more accurately translates to is “for what?”, that is you’re asking what the purpose of doing something is, you’re asking what the objective is, what the person intends to accomplish by doing it, in other words you’re asking for what purpose they’re doing it, hence the translation for it really being “for what?”, or perhaps “what for?”. See how that does sort of fall under the definition of “why”, but a better, more precise way of putting it would be “for what”? It’s sort of like translating “de qué parte?”, which means “from what part”, as “where”–yes, you could, it’s not incorrect, but there’s a more accurate translation.

“Por qué”, on the other hand, is typically used when you simply want to know what someone’s motivation is or what the cause is of something happening. Maybe they didn’t have an objective, maybe they just did it because they were angry or happy or sad or whatever, or maybe there was an objective, in which case you can still use “por qué” though perhaps “para qué” may have been a better choice if you wanted to make it clear that you wanted to know what their objective was, not just their motivation for doing it (sometimes those are the same thing, sometimes not).

I like translating things literally because it helps you understand where the actual meaning came from. Here, it really helps: “para” means “for” in the sense of “in order to”, whereas “por” is more frequently used to mean “by” or “because of”, and of course “qué” means “what”, so let’s take that and look at these two phrases and see if this makes sense. “Por qué” literally means “because of what”, as in “what caused this to occur?”, whereas “para qué” literally means “in order to what?”, as in “you’re doing this in order to…what?”. Does this make sense now? Hopefully this also helps you to remember when to use “por” and when to use “para”, as well, since I know a lot of people have trouble with that.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post Para qué vs. Por qué – The difference explained and when to use each appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

The Spanish Subjunctive Explained: How the Subjunctive Works Plus a Mnemonic Trick to Help you Remember When to Use It (The W.E.I.R.D.O. System)

Andrew — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 10:54:04 +0000

Requirements

1. Two different subjects

2. A relative pronoun (“que”, “como”, “cual”, “donde”, or “quien”)

There must also be two Clauses, though this is an automatic consequence of requiring 2 subjects so it doesn’t get its own rule.

W.E.I.R.D.O.

Wishes
Emotions
Impersonal Expressions
Recommendations
Doubt/Denial
Ojalá

(note: all subjunctive verbs in these example sentences are bolded)

Verbs commonly seen in this category include aconsejar (to advise), sugerir (to suggest), recomendar (to recommend), rogar (to beg), ordenar (to order), and proponer (to suggest or propose).

Verbs commonly used to express doubt include dudar (to doubt), creer (to believe), pensar (to think), negar (to deny), “no estar seguro” (to not be sure), suponer (to assume or suppose), etc.

Bonus: Hypotheticals

Deberían tratarla como si fuera sagrada.

“They should treat it as if it were sacred.”

Me gritaba como si fuera niño.

“She’s was yelling at me as if I were a child.”

Siento como si estuviera dormida aquí.

“I feel as if I were asleep here.”

Estás mirándome como si estuviera loco.

“You’re looking at me as if I were crazy.”

Searching Reverso Context for “como si” yields tons of examples of this in practice, definitely have a look for more examples of this phenomenon in the wild.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post The Spanish Subjunctive Explained: How the Subjunctive Works Plus a Mnemonic Trick to Help you Remember When to Use It (The W.E.I.R.D.O. System) appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

How Many Words Do You Need to Know to Be Fluent in Spanish (or Any Foreign Language)? And Which Words Should You Be Learning?

Andrew — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:07:37 +0000

This is going to start out a bit technical and academic, but I promise that if you’ll wade through it you will be rewarded with some very useful practical information that you can use to significantly enhance your learning of the Spanish language, or any other second language, by not just doing it better but doing it more efficiently and therefore requiring far less time to become fluent. Understanding how many words you need to know to be fluent in Spanish will help you design a study system based on precisely what it is that you want to do with the language: speak with native speakers, read fiction, read and/or write in a technical or academic field, etc., or some combination thereof. This is a very important distinction to make because, as you’ll see in the study below, although there isn’t much difference between how many words you need to know to speak Spanish and how many you need to write Spanish, which words are most commonly used and therefore should be focused on does vary significantly between the two applications. First, let’s start with some definitions so that we can understand what’s going on here:

Lexeme: A lexeme is a reduction of a word to it’s most basic meaning. For example: the word “water” could be a noun referring to H2O, or it could be a verb referring to the act of giving water to a plant, so in this case that counts as two separate and distinct lexemes, even though it’s the same word, “water”. The reason it is done this way is that if you have to learn both definitions then it is, for our purposes, the same as learning two different words that each have only one definition – it requires the same amount of time and effort and memory space in your head, so when we say “how many words do you need to know?” we’re counting lexemes, or in lay terms, “definitions”. In other words, we’re saying that each definition is to be counted as a separate “word” (when it’s done this way, it’s called a lexeme), regardless of whether those definitions refer to the same precise combination of letters (what would commonly be called a word) or not: the noun “water” and the verb “water” are two separate words (or lexemes, more accurately), right? Right. I should also note that different forms (such as with verbs) of the same word, as long as the same basic definition is maintained, count as one lexeme, so “is” and “are” are not two separate lexemes, but one.

Corpus: Latin for “body”. The body of knowledge that you based your information on, in this case books, newspapers, transcripts of spoken language, etc. Basically it means your data set. With regards to determining word frequency, the corpus is what it is that you looked at to determine which words occur and with what frequency. If your corpus for making a frequency list for English is 13th century bibles, then your data isn’t going to be too relevant to contemporary language.

Register: What setting the language is used in. We’re going to have three distinct registers that we’ll use: oral (spoken language), written fiction, and written non-fiction.

Range: How widely used the word is. In other words, if your corpus consists of four books, and a particular word shows up as 5% of all words in one book and never occurs in any of the others, that one book is going to incorrectly weight that word as being a lot more important than it likely really is – you would say that particular word “has a very narrow range”. An example would be if you’ve got a diet book as part of your corpus, we’ll presume it’s small, you might find that the words “protein”, “cardiovascular”, and “glycemic” end up on your frequency list when they probably shouldn’t because these words aren’t often used in daily conversation or most written communication – this is because you’ve got something that’s part of your corpus that has a very narrow and specific subject matter that wouldn’t normally be discussed very frequently, and therefore some of the words used therein have a very narrow range. Usually it wouldn’t be something this extreme, since such obvious outliers would be removed from the corpus by a competent researcher, but what you will see are words that are used very frequently in written communication but hardly at all in spoken communication and vice-versa: that is important and something to take note of.

First, some data

The primary study that I’m going off of here is that done by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, which I will embed below so that you can read it, download it, whatever you want to do:

Spanish Word Frequency Study by Andrew Tracey on Scribd

This is a truly unique and valuable study: you would think that there would be lots of data out there with regards to word frequency lists in Spanish, and lots of good Spanish frequency diciontaries, but there aren’t. There’s no lack of curious language students and researchers asking, “Just how many words do you need to know to be fluent in Spanish/French/German?” etc. (I should note this also depends heavily on how you define “fluent” but that’s another discussion entirely). The primary reason is that it’s so difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to do a study like this properly. The next most recent comparable study was one done in 1964 (he makes mention of it in the beginning).

They extracted the 6000 most frequent lexemes and broke it down by written fiction, written non-fiction, and oral (spoken); they then further organized the data by lexeme type (noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) so you’ll see which particular type of word is the most used thereby allowing you to focus your studies appropriately.

By the way, the frequency dictionary they mention, which this study was written about, that contains the entire list of the 6000 highest-frequency lexemes, is available if you’re interested. For some reason the hardcover is ridiculously expensive at $156, but they’ve got a paperback edition here on Amazon for $34.95 as of this writing.

Right, let’s get down to brass tacks. According to the above study, for Spanish:

Learning the first 1000 most frequently used words in the entire language will allow you to understand 76.0% of all non-fiction writing, 79.6% of all fiction writing, and an astounding 87.8% of all oral speech.
Learning the top 2000 most frequently used words will get you to 84% for non-fiction, 86.1% for fiction, and 92.7% for oral speech.
And learning the top 3000 most frequently used words will get you to 88.2% for non-fiction, 89.6% for fiction, and 94.0% for oral speech.

How many words do you need to know to speak Spanish?

Essentially, just learning the top 1000 words will, if you’re primarily interested in speaking to people as most language learners are, get you to the point where you can understand roughly 90% of the spoken language – this is more than enough to be able to muddle through nearly any conversation. Sure, you’ll have to stop the speaker frequently to get them to define words for you and/or you may have to pull out your dictionary quite frequently, but my point is that it’s enough of a base for you to actually start speaking to people (which is the most important part of learning any language: actually talking to native speakers) – you’ll be able to say nearly anything you need to in some way or another, and you should be able to understand the general gist of what someone else is saying to you, even if you do have to stop and ask them for help a few times.

Professor Arguelles, arguably one of the world’s foremost experts on language learning and who, himself, is fluent in eleven languages and has studied 58 at some point or another, has addressed this in a fascinating thread on my favorite language-learning forum, HTLAL, concerning how many words you need to learn (he is directly addressing the above study in this quote) and does a superb job of boiling this down for us language-learners in practical terms that are useful to us:

“The maddening thing about these numbers and statistics is that they are impossible to pin down precisely and thus they vary from source to source. The rounded numbers that I use to explain this to my students I usually write in a bull’s eye target on the whiteboard, but I don’t have the computer skills to draw circles in this post, so I will just have to give a list:

250 words constitute the essential core of a language, those without which you cannot construct any sentence.

750 words constitute those that are used every single day by every person who speaks the language.

2500 words constitute those that should enable you to express everything you could possibly want to say, albeit often by awkward circumlocutions.

5000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers without higher education.

10,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education.

20,000 words constitute what you need to recognize passively in order to read, understand, and enjoy a work of literature such as a novel by a notable author.”

Now, in the above study by Davies, here’s where things start to get really interesting:

“Assume that a language learner is aiming for 90% coverage in each of the four parts of speech that represent open classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This 90% figure will be obtained by knowing about 2600 nouns, 230 verbs, 980 adjectives, and 50 adverbs, or a total of about 3800 total forms.” [refer to page 110 of the study for a detailed table that breaks down these four word types in much greater detail]

So you can see that nouns completely dominate the average spoken vocabulary (the above data is from the spoken, not written, corpus), constituting 2600 out of 3800 lexemes, which is 68.4%, more than two-thirds, of all lexemes used. You should keep in mind, however, that each verb is counted as a single lexeme no matter how it is conjugated: so saying that you only need to know 230 verbs is a bit disingenuous when you not only have to know each of those verbs but you also have to ‘know’ a bunch of different conjugations for each one as well (e.g. you don’t just have to learn ‘ser’, you have to learn ‘soy’, ‘eres’, ‘es’, ‘somos’, ‘son’, ‘fui’, ‘fuiste’, ‘fue’, ‘sea’, ‘seamos’, ‘sean’, etc.).

How many words do you need to know to write Spanish?

Also, they found that (here’s where we get into register and range) certain words had a very high frequency of use in one of the three registers (oral, written fiction, written non-fiction) but barely appeared at all in the other two, or it was present in two (typically both written registers) but not at all in one of the others. So you’ll see that there are words which are far more valuable to learn than certain other words depending on which register you’re most interested in becoming proficient in. Have a look at the two tables below, the first one shows the ten words with the greatest difference in range between oral and non-fiction that have an extremely high oral range (they are very commonly spoken words), whereas the second table shows the same except these are the ten words with the greatest frequency difference that have an extremely high range in written non-fiction (they’re extremely common in non-fiction writing but not at all in oral speech)…I’m not sure I explained that well, if not leave a comment and I’ll try again:

Table 1

Table 2

Why? For what purpose are you learning this language?

How you intend to use the language in question (Spanish or whatever the case may be for you) is very important in determining which words you should focus on, primarily this comes into play with regards to whether you’re more concerned about the spoken language or the written language. Most language-learners are far more concerned about being able to actually speak to native speakers of the language than they are with anything else, though there are exceptions (people who wish to be able to read certain specific technical journals, such as an engineer who only wants to be able to read the original German or Japanese instruction manuals and schematics for the devices used in his field and does not need to be able to actually speak the language) as well as certain special needs (someone who is most interested in spoken language, but they also need special emphasis in a certain area, such as the businessman who not only wants to speak basic everyday Japanese but also needs to learn certain business terms that are specific only to his job and wouldn’t be common anywhere else).

So…what are you going to use it for? Do you have any special needs or areas of interest that you would like to learn the terminology for in the language you’re learning? I’m a pretty big computer nerd, so in addition to everyday spoken Spanish, I might also like to know how to say things like “hard drive”, “TCP/IP”, “Python [the programming language]”, “blog”, “forum”, “social news”, “search engine”, “link”, etc. See what I mean? Don’t neglect areas like that, everyone has some–whether you’re into cars or rugby or chess or collecting dead insects, you’re likely going to want to know the words and phrases that are common only in those specific subjects.

Practical Application, or: What’s the point of all this?

Look, if you’ll use a quality SRS (Spaced Repetition Software) like Anki and spend 30-45 minutes a day studying vocabulary, you can very easily learn 20, 30, even 50 new words per day up to the point where you’ve got a couple thousand words in your target language within a month or so, it would be very easy. If you’ll do that, and maybe practice speaking a bit by watching subtitled movies and repeating after the native speakers (pause, repeat what someone just said, rewind and repeat as necessary until you’ve got it, wash rinse repeat, etc.) for a couple of weeks, you’ll be at the point where you’ll be able to start conversing with native speakers, albeit poorly (my favorite saying: “You learn to speak a language by doing so, poorly at first”). You’ll be awkward and slow but you will be able to muddle through, and you will pick up speed very rapidly if you’ll make it a habit to speak with a native for an hour or so a day, every day (remember: consistency!). I promise you’ll be conversationally fluent within a couple of months of the time that you started conversing with natives. Voila, you’re there. What are the best ways to do this?

The best way is with a one-on-one tutor, and for that I recommend a service called iTalki (you’re looking at about $8-15/hour for informal conversation practice/instruction, more for a formal course or test prep.). However, given that you’ll want at least 2-3 classes per week and that comes out to $16-$45 per week – or between $64 and $180 per month – that’s too expensive for many people and in that case I really recommend you check out a service called GoSpanish that provides unlimited online classes with a native speaker (live, on a video call similar to Skype) for as little as $39 per month (yes, that’s $39/month for unlimited 1-hour classes, you can take a dozen a day every day if you like). Their class size is typically just 3-5 students per teacher and, having taken classes with them myself, I can tell you they’re excellent. See my review of GoSpanish here for more information. Also, if you’re interested, I’ve reviewed iTalki as well.

Here’s a quote from someone commenting on that HTLAL thread I mentioned above:

“I can add from my experience that knowledge of about 1500 words allows you to get a fairly general picture of everything you read. This is the number of Hungarian words I learned since march. I write them all down on flashcards and count how much each day – that’s why I can pinpoint the number.

At the same time it is obvious that my 1500 word vocab isn’t tweaked to efficiency in basic communication. I simply write down and translate everything I read and lately also the words I manage to pick up from radio. That’s why I know the hungarian word for “voter turnout” but I don’t know yet how to book a flight or hotel room :/”

And this leads into my last, and most important point: all of this is just a means to and end, and that end is speaking. You must speak. The whole point of figuring out all this word frequency crap is just so you can get away from it as fast as possible and into the realm of actually talking to native speakers, because that is where you really learn the language. Memorizing all the vocabulary and grammar rules in the world, as my friend Benny loves to say, will not ever get you anywhere near fluent. I’ll leave you with a quote from a native Czech speaker and fellow language nerd (it’s the last post in that HTLAL thread):

“Yesterday I met a woman who has been taking Czech lessons twice a week for two years. I asked her some very simple questions “Do you like coffee?”, “Are you Czech?” and she was completely tongue tied. The best she could manage was “Urm, arm, yes” to the first question, and “no” to the second.

At first I imagined she didn’t know much Czech at all. I decided to probe into her vocabulary, and found it was quite extensive. She knew words like “octopus” and “hovercraft” in Czech. Yes somehow couldn’t say “To be honest, I prefer tea”.

I gave her a two hour lesson in how to construct useful conversational phrases. Starting off with simple things like “I have to say that ..” and “Don’t be upset, but” and building up and chaining these things together into more complex sentences such as “That isn’t something I have given much thought to, but … now that I reflect on it, … my personal opinion is …”

She told me it was a very uplifting lesson, since she now felt “fluent” in Czech rather than being frozen with a trapped vocabulary of thousands of words. In fact, she got back to me later that after the lesson, she went into the city and had sophisticated and stressless conversations in a couple shops and with a waitress in an ice-cream parlour.

Of course, I was delighted to hear this, and it certainly gave my ego a boost. But, what was most joyful for me to hear is that it would now give her future learning a “usefulness filter”. She said that now she wouldn’t just remember lists of words, but rather filter them through how useful they would be in real conversations, and that real conversations, with real people, will help her get a reality check on this as she goes along.”

You can learn all the vocabulary in the world, but if you don’t learn how to use it, you’re never going to be fluent, and the only way to do that is to speak with native speakers. Again, I really recommend having a look at GoSpanish, they’re super cheap for what they’re offering. Check out my review of them here for more info and/or go to their site for a free trial if you like.

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Please be sure to persuse the whole “Basic Spanish Grammar Rules: Lessons & Explanation” category on my site, I have several other articles there that may interst you, especially What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important, a brief guide to regional variation of forms of address (tú, usted, vos, etc.) and my beginner’s guide to the Spanish subjunctive.

Professor Arguelles’ website on language-learning

Part 4 of Iversen’s Guide to Learning Languages: How many words do you need to learn?

Here’s the RAE’s reference corpus of current Spanish taken from a combination (says this site) of spoken and written sources (kind of a problem since it only gives you a very general idea of how common these words are and you can’t sort by spoken/written and, as we noted above, there can be some big discrepancies there between the two). The Real Academia Española (the “Royal Spanish Academy”) is by far the single most respected authority on the Spanish language; see the Wikipedia article on them for more information.

Somebody else did the pull-them-from-subtitles trick on their own and then made their data publicly available. Here’s the Spanish list published so you can read it online without having to download it first.

Here’s an excellent paper by Paul Nation and Robert Waring at the Notre Dame Seishin University in Japan called: Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage And Word Lists

Here are a series of lists on Wiktionary taken from subtitles of movies by somebody back in 2007. As they note, many of these are from translations of English-language movies and so won’t really give you the most accurate picture of what’s naturally used in Spanish.

Here’s a very widely circulated list of the 1000 most common words in English.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

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