Spanish II

Ayer hablo con mi abuela por teléfono. That sentence is broken, and everything you learned last year is powerless to fix it. The vocabulary is right, the agreement is right, the accent on teléfono is right. The verb is the problem: hablo means I speak or I am speaking, and ayer means yesterday, so the sentence says something like "Yesterday I am speaking with my grandmother." Spanish I taught you to describe the world as it is. This lesson starts teaching you to report the world as it was, and the repair is one form: Ayer hablé con mi abuela por teléfono. (Yesterday I spoke with my grandmother on the phone.)

Before you read: write down, in English, three things you did yesterday. Keep the list. By the end of this lesson you will be able to write all three in Spanish, and you will notice that each one is a closed box: it started, it finished, it is over.

What ayer does to a verb

The tense you are learning is the preterite, called el pretérito or el pretérito perfecto simple in Spanish grammars. Its job is not simply to move an action into the past. It is to present that action as finished, as a single completed whole with a beginning and an end.

Compare two English sentences that both sit in the past: "I lived in Lima for three years" and "I was living in Lima when the earthquake hit." Both are past. Only the first draws a box around the whole stay and closes it. That closing is what the preterite does, every time, without exception. Spanish grammarians call this quality aspect: not when something happened, but how the speaker is packaging it.

Key idea: the preterite is a claim about shape, not about distance. Viví en Lima tres años (I lived in Lima for three years) is preterite even though three years is a long time, because the speaker has closed the box. Length has nothing to do with it.

The -ar endings, and the two accents that carry them

Take hablar (to speak). Drop the -ar to reach the stem habl- and add these endings.

Two forms carry a written accent, and it is not decoration. Spanish marks stress in writing whenever a word breaks the default rule, which you learned in Spanish I: a word ending in a vowel, n or s is stressed on the second-to-last syllable unless an accent says otherwise. Hablé and habló are stressed on the final syllable, so the accent is compulsory.

Say these three aloud and hear how much depends on one mark: hablo (HA-blo, I speak), habló (ha-BLO, he spoke), hablo again. The difference between talking about now and talking about yesterday is a single stressed syllable. Native speakers hear it instantly, which is why dropping the accent in writing is a real error and not a typo.

One set of endings for -er and -ir

Here is the first piece of good news in the course. In the present tense, -er and -ir verbs part company in two forms. In the preterite they do not part company at all: they share one identical set of endings.

So the whole regular system is two sets of endings, not three. Learn the -ar column, learn the shared -er and -ir column, and you can put several hundred verbs into the past this afternoon. Read these and check yourself against the tables:

• Comí una arepa en el mercado. (I ate an arepa at the market.)
• ¿Escribiste la carta? (Did you write the letter?)
• Ella salió a las siete. (She left at seven.)
• Aprendimos veinte palabras nuevas. (We learned twenty new words.)
• Los turistas subieron al mirador. (The tourists went up to the lookout point.)

The nosotros trap

Look carefully at hablamos and vivimos. Each one is both the present and the preterite. Hablamos español en casa means we speak Spanish at home; Ayer hablamos dos horas means yesterday we spoke for two hours. Nothing in the verb tells you which. The time expression does.

This bothers English speakers, who expect the verb to carry the whole load. It does not bother native speakers, because context settles it every time and because the ambiguity only affects -ar and -ir verbs. The -er verbs keep them apart cleanly: comemos is present, comimos is preterite.

The point: when you write a nosotros sentence in the past, give the reader a time marker. Anoche cenamos tarde (Last night we ate dinner late) is unambiguous; Cenamos tarde on its own is a coin toss.

Words that pull the preterite

Certain expressions almost force the preterite, because each one draws a boundary around the event. Learning them is faster than learning rules, and they will do most of your work in the next three lessons.

Notice hace dos días. Spanish builds "ago" with the verb hacer plus a stretch of time, in that order: Llamé a mi tía hace dos días (I called my aunt two days ago). English puts the time first and the word ago last; Spanish puts hace first. Reverse the order in your head as you translate.

A day in Oaxaca, verb by verb

Here is one traveller's Tuesday in Oaxaca City, told entirely in regular preterites. Cover the English and read the Spanish first.

• Me desperté temprano y abrí la ventana. (I woke up early and opened the window.)
• Bajé a la calle y compré pan en la esquina. (I went down to the street and bought bread on the corner.)
• Caminé al mercado Benito Juárez y miré las flores. (I walked to the Benito Juarez market and looked at the flowers.)
• Una señora me vendió dos mangos por veinte pesos. (A woman sold me two mangoes for twenty pesos.)
• Comí en un puesto pequeño: sopa, tortillas y agua de jamaica. (I ate at a small stall: soup, tortillas and hibiscus water.)
• Por la tarde visité el Templo de Santo Domingo. (In the afternoon I visited the Templo de Santo Domingo.)
• Subí al segundo piso del museo y leí las explicaciones. (I went up to the second floor of the museum and read the explanations.)
• Escribí tres postales y las mandé desde el correo. (I wrote three postcards and sent them from the post office.)
• Cenamos a las nueve en casa de la familia Ruiz. (We had dinner at nine at the Ruiz family home.)
• Salí del centro a las once y volví al hotel. (I left the centre at eleven and returned to the hotel.)

Every verb in that paragraph is closed. The traveller is not describing what Oaxaca was like or what she used to do there; she is listing events, each one boxed and finished. That listing quality is the preterite's natural home, and it is why the tense carries almost all forward motion in a story.

One form in the list is worth a second look. Leí comes from leer, and the él form is leyó rather than the expected leió, because Spanish will not leave an unstressed i sitting between two vowels. The same thing happens to oír (oyó) and creer (creyó). You will meet the full set of these spelling adjustments in the next lesson.

The mistake English speakers actually make

It is not forgetting the endings. It is reaching for a helping verb. English builds its past questions and negatives out of "did": Did you eat? I did not eat. Spanish has no such word in that job, so the preterite form has to do all of it alone.

• Did you eat? is ¿Comiste? and never a two-word construction with hacer.
• I did not call is No llamé, with no before the verb and nothing else added.

Common misconceptions

• The preterite is "the past tense" in Spanish. It is one of two, and choosing between them is a skill you will spend three lessons on. Spanish has a second past tense, the imperfect, for actions presented as ongoing, habitual or unfinished. A student who treats the preterite as the past tense will say Cuando fui niño for "when I was a child" and be understood, but marked wrong.
• The accent is optional. Hablo and habló are different words with different subjects. The mark is spelling, not decoration.
• Long actions cannot be preterite. Trabajé allí ocho años (I worked there for eight years) is perfectly normal preterite, because the eight years are presented as one closed block.
• The nosotros form must be different from the present. For -ar and -ir verbs it is not, and no amount of wishing will change it.

What to carry forward

The preterite reports an action as finished, boxed, over. Regular -ar verbs take -é, -aste, -ó, -amos, -asteis, -aron; regular -er and -ir verbs share -í, -iste, -ió, -imos, -isteis, -ieron. The yo and él forms of regular verbs carry a written accent because their stress falls on the final syllable, and that accent is the only thing separating hablo from habló. The nosotros form of -ar and -ir verbs is identical to the present, so lean on time markers such as ayer, anoche, la semana pasada and hace dos días. Spanish needs no helper: ¿Comiste? is a complete question and No llamé is a complete denial. Next comes the group that refuses these endings entirely.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Preterite. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Preterite tense forms. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. Colaboradores de Wikipedia. (n.d.). Pretérito perfecto simple. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 23, el pretérito perfecto simple. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 14, the preterite. Routledge.

Two messages landed in the same conversation on a Sunday afternoon. The first: ¿Fuiste al concierto? (Did you go to the concert?) The second, an hour later: No pude. Tuve que trabajar y llegué a casa a medianoche. (I could not. I had to work and I got home at midnight.) Four verbs, and not one of them obeys the tables you learned in the last lesson. Fuiste has no accent. Pude and tuve have stems that do not appear in their infinitives at all. Llegué has grown a letter u out of nowhere. This lesson is about why, and it is shorter work than it looks, because the irregulars are organised rather than random.

One shared set of endings for the whole irregular group

Spanish grammars call these the pretéritos fuertes, the strong preterites, and the name is literal: the stress falls on the stem rather than on the ending. That single fact explains their most visible feature, which is that they carry no written accents at all.

Compare tuve with the regular hablé. The regular form ends in the stressed vowel and must be marked; the irregular form is stressed on TU and needs no mark. So once you know a verb belongs to this group, you can stop worrying about accents on it entirely.

Worth holding on to: learn the changed stem, then bolt on -e, -iste, -o, -imos, -isteis, -ieron. One ending set covers every verb in the table below.

The stems, grouped by what happened to them

Grouping these by the vowel they moved to turns a list of twelve exceptions into four small families. Read down each column.

Two details in that table are easy to miss and both are tested constantly.

• The j stems drop the i of the ellos ending. It is dijeron, not dijieron, and trajeron, not trajieron. A j already carries that sound in Spanish, so the extra i would be doing nothing.
• Hacer writes its él form with z. Hizo, not hico. Spanish spells one sound two ways depending on the next letter: c before e and i, z before a, o and u. Since the ending is -o, the letter has to change to keep the sound. The same logic runs through the spelling changes further down this lesson.

The four that stand outside the families

Four very common verbs have preterites you simply memorise. Two of them share one set of forms, which sounds like a disaster and is not.

Ser (to be) and ir (to go) have identical preterites, and context does all the disambiguating without effort, because the two verbs are followed by different things. A destination means ir; a description means ser.

• Fui a Granada en mayo. (I went to Granada in May.) A place follows, so this is ir.
• Fui camarero dos veranos. (I was a waiter for two summers.) A role follows, so this is ser.
• La película fue muy larga. (The film was very long.) A description follows, so this is ser.

Notice also that dio and vio carry no accent, even though regular -er verbs would demand one. They are one syllable plus one, too short for the default rule to be broken, so nothing is marked. Writing dió is a spelling error that the Real Academia Española ruled out decades ago.

Three spelling changes that only touch the yo form

These verbs are not irregular. Their endings are completely regular, and the spelling shifts only to protect the sound, and only in the yo form, where the ending begins with e.

Everything else in those verbs is ordinary: Busqué mi pasaporte por media hora y por fin lo encontré en la mochila. (I looked for my passport for half an hour and finally found it in the backpack.)

The third-person changes in -er and -ir verbs

Two more small patterns, both confined to the él and ellos forms.

First, when an -er or -ir stem ends in a vowel, the unstressed i of the ending turns into y, because Spanish will not leave a weak i stranded between two vowels: leer gives leyó and leyeron, oír gives oyó and oyeron, creer gives creyó and creyeron, and caer gives cayó and cayeron.

Second, -ir verbs that change their stem vowel in the present do it again in the preterite, but only in the third person, and only e to i or o to u.

This is why a waiter reporting a table's order says La señora pidió el pescado y los niños pidieron pollo (The lady ordered the fish and the children ordered chicken), while you, reporting your own, say Pedí el pescado.

The messages, now readable

Go back to the two messages at the top and name every form. Fuiste is ir, second person, the ser and ir set. Pude is poder, a u stem. Tuve is tener, a u stem, and tuve que trabajar is the past of tengo que: I had to work. Llegué is regular with the -gar spelling change. Here is the whole exchange written out, with one more turn added:

• ¿Fuiste al concierto el sábado? (Did you go to the concert on Saturday?)
• No pude. Tuve que trabajar y llegué a casa a medianoche. (I could not. I had to work and I got home at midnight.)
• ¡Qué pena! Estuvo buenísimo. Vinieron dos mil personas. (What a shame! It was fantastic. Two thousand people came.)
• ¿Quién hizo los arreglos? ¿Y qué dijo la banda al final? (Who made the arrangements? And what did the band say at the end?)
• Mi primo los hizo. Dijeron gracias y tocaron una canción más. (My cousin made them. They said thank you and played one more song.)

Common misconceptions

• Irregular preterites take accents like regular ones. They do not, and tuvé, estuvé and pudé are among the most frequent written errors in second-year work. If the stem changed, the accent is gone.
• Fui is ambiguous, so good writers avoid it. Native speakers use it dozens of times a day without confusion, because what follows the verb settles the meaning.
• Spelling changes mean the verb is irregular. Llegué and busqué sound exactly as a regular verb should; the letters changed precisely in order to keep the regular sound.
• Stem-changing -ir verbs change everywhere. Only the third person changes in the preterite: pedí keeps its e, pidió does not.

Putting it together

The strong preterites are stressed on the stem, so they carry no written accents and share one ending set: -e, -iste, -o, -imos, -isteis, -ieron. Learn the stems in families: tuv-, estuv-, anduv-, pud-, pus-, sup- for the u group; hic-, quis-, vin- for the i group; dij-, traj-, conduj- for the j group, which drops the i of -ieron. Ser and ir share fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuisteis, fueron, and what follows the verb tells you which one it is; dar and ver take -er endings with no accents at all. In regular verbs, -car, -gar and -zar adjust their spelling in the yo form only, a vowel-final stem turns i into y in the third person, and stem-changing -ir verbs shift e to i or o to u in the third person alone. In short: nothing here is random; every change is protecting either a sound or a stress pattern.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish irregular verbs. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Preterite tense forms. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish conjugation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 4, verbos irregulares. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 13, irregular verb forms. Routledge.

Every Sunday at two o'clock the Ordóñez family ate at their grandmother's flat in Seville. The table was too small, so somebody always sat on the arm of the sofa. The grandmother made the same rice every week and complained that nobody helped. Here is that paragraph in Spanish, and every single verb is in a tense you have not met.

Todos los domingos a las dos, la familia Ordóñez comía en el piso de la abuela. La mesa era pequeña, así que alguien siempre se sentaba en el brazo del sofá. La abuela hacía el mismo arroz cada semana y se quejaba de que nadie la ayudaba.

Put those verbs in the preterite and the paragraph falls apart. Comió would mean the family ate there once, on one Sunday, and then never again. What the paragraph wants is a habit, a background, a way things were over an unmarked stretch of years. That is the imperfect, in Spanish el pretérito imperfecto.

Two sets of endings and nothing else to learn

The imperfect is the easiest tense in the Spanish verb system. There are two ending sets, they are completely regular, and the whole language contains exactly three irregular verbs.

The -er and -ir verbs share one column again, as they did in the preterite. Every -ía form carries a written accent, because the i and the a would otherwise collapse into a single syllable; the accent forces them apart, so comía is co-MI-a, three syllables. In the -ar column only hablábamos is marked.

The yo and él forms are identical in both columns. Comía is I was eating or he was eating, and only context or an added pronoun sorts it out: Yo comía mientras él leía. (I was eating while he was reading.) This is one of the few places in Spanish where the subject pronoun earns its keep.

The three irregulars, which you can learn in a minute

Why this matters: the preterite made you memorise twelve stems and four oddities. The imperfect asks for three verbs. Learn era, iba and veía today and the tense is finished forever.

What the imperfect is actually for

The imperfect presents an action as open: unfinished, repeated, or simply going on. Five jobs cover almost every use you will meet.

English has three ways of saying the habitual one, and Spanish has this single form for all of them. Íbamos a la costa is we went, we used to go, and we would go to the coast, depending on how you want it in English. The Spanish does not change.

Two of those jobs deserve their own note, because English speakers get them wrong for a whole year otherwise. Age in the past is tenía, never tuvo: Cuando tenía doce años, aprendí a nadar (When I was twelve, I learned to swim). Clock time in the past is era or eran, never fue: Eran las tres y media (It was half past three), with eran in the plural because the hours are plural, and Era la una in the singular because one o'clock is one.

The words that call for it

These expressions mark repetition or an open stretch of time, and they pull the imperfect the way ayer pulls the preterite.

The house, and who did what in it

Household chores are the natural vocabulary for this tense, because chores are repetition itself. Here is the Ordóñez flat again, in more detail.

• Mi tío sacaba la basura antes de comer. (My uncle used to take out the rubbish before lunch.)
• Los primos ponían la mesa y discutían por las sillas. (The cousins would set the table and argue over the chairs.)
• Nadie quería lavar los platos, así que lo hacía la abuela. (Nobody wanted to wash the dishes, so the grandmother did it.)
• Mi prima Marta barría el suelo y luego pasaba la aspiradora. (My cousin Marta swept the floor and then vacuumed.)
• Mi madre tendía la ropa en la azotea porque no había secadora. (My mother hung the washing on the roof terrace because there was no dryer.)
• Yo hacía la cama por la mañana, pero nunca ordenaba el cuarto. (I made the bed in the morning, but I never tidied the room.)
• Después de comer, todos veíamos la tele y nadie se movía. (After lunch we all watched television and nobody moved.)

Notice no había secadora. Había is the imperfect of hay, there is or there are, and like hay it never becomes plural: había una silla and había veinte sillas are both correct. Writing habían sillas is a mistake made by native speakers too, and still counted wrong in school.

That long afternoon after lunch has a name in Spain: the sobremesa, the stretch of talking that follows a meal once the plates are empty and nobody has stood up. It is a habit rather than an event, which is exactly why every sentence describing it lands in the imperfect.

Common misconceptions

• The imperfect just means "used to". That covers the habitual job and misses the other four. Estaba nerviosa is I was nervous, not I used to be nervous; Llovía is it was raining, once, on the afternoon being described.
• Was plus -ing needs estar plus a gerund. Spanish can say estaba lloviendo, but the plain imperfect llovía already means it was raining and is far more common in narrative.
• Age and time can go in the preterite. Tuve diez años and Fueron las tres are both wrong. Age and clock time are states, so they take tenía and eran.
• Había changes for plural nouns. It does not. One form serves any number.

Looking back

The imperfect has two ending sets, -aba for -ar verbs and -ía for -er and -ir verbs, and only ser, ir and ver are irregular. Every -ía form is accented, and so is hablábamos. Use the tense for habits and repetition, for actions in progress, for description and states, for age, clock time and weather, and for two things happening at once with mientras. Watch the words that call it: siempre, todos los días, a menudo, de niño, en aquella época. Remember that había never becomes plural. Bottom line: the preterite says what happened, and the imperfect says what was going on while it happened. In the next lesson you will need both in the same paragraph, and the choice between them stops being a rule and becomes a decision.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Imperfect tense forms. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Imperfect. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. SpanishDict. (n.d.). How to talk about chores in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 23, el pretérito imperfecto. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 14, the imperfect. Routledge.

Here is a story in seven sentences, all preterite. Read it and notice how it feels.

Lucía salió de la biblioteca a las siete. Caminó hacia la parada. Empezó a llover. Corrió. Un coche se detuvo. El conductor bajó la ventanilla. Fue su profesor de química. (Lucia left the library at seven. She walked towards the stop. It started to rain. She ran. A car stopped. The driver lowered the window. It was her chemistry teacher.)

Nothing in it is wrong. Every form is correct and a Spanish speaker would understand all of it. But it reads like a police report, because seven closed boxes in a row give the reader no place to stand. Now the same story with some of those verbs moved into the imperfect.

Lucía salió de la biblioteca a las siete. Hacía calor y la calle estaba vacía. Mientras caminaba hacia la parada, empezó a llover. No llevaba paraguas, así que corrió. Un coche se detuvo a su lado. El conductor, que llevaba gafas de sol aunque ya era de noche, bajó la ventanilla. Era su profesor de química. (Lucia left the library at seven. It was hot and the street was empty. While she was walking towards the stop, it started to rain. She was not carrying an umbrella, so she ran. A car stopped beside her. The driver, who was wearing sunglasses although it was already dark, lowered the window. It was her chemistry teacher.)

Same events, same order. What changed is that the second version has a stage. The imperfect built the heat, the empty street, the missing umbrella, the sunglasses and the darkness; the preterite kept the events moving through it.

Stage and action

That is the whole idea, and it is worth stating plainly because it replaces about fifteen rules. In any Spanish past narrative:

• The preterite carries the events. Each one happens, finishes, and hands the story to the next.
• The imperfect carries the stage: the weather, the time, the setting, what people were wearing, how they felt, what was already going on when the events arrived.

The core of it: ask what each verb is doing for the story. If it moves, it is preterite. If it describes the conditions the movement happens in, it is imperfect. This is a judgement about the aspect you want, not a lookup in a table, which is why a list of trigger words will only take you so far.

The interrupted action, which is the pattern you will use most

One shape appears constantly, in homework and in real speech: something was going on, and something else cut into it. Spanish puts the ongoing thing in the imperfect and the interruption in the preterite.

When the two actions run side by side with neither interrupting the other, use mientras and put both in the imperfect: Mientras mi padre cocinaba, yo ponía la mesa. (While my father cooked, I set the table.) And when one event simply follows another, both are preterite: Terminé la tarea, cerré el libro y salí. (I finished the homework, closed the book and left.)

Four verbs that change meaning, not just tense

With most verbs, switching tense changes the packaging. With these four it changes what the sentence says in English, and this is the single most common place a good second-year student still loses marks.

Read the pairs aloud and feel the difference:

• Conocía a Marta desde la escuela primaria. (I had known Marta since primary school.) versus Conocí a Marta en una boda. (I met Marta at a wedding.)
• No sabía que estabas enfermo. (I did not know you were ill.) versus Supe la noticia por mi hermana. (I found out the news from my sister.)
• Quería llamarte, pero era muy tarde. (I wanted to call you, but it was very late.) versus No quiso firmar el documento. (He refused to sign the document.)
• Podía correr diez kilómetros a los veinte años. (I could run ten kilometres at twenty.) versus Por fin pude abrir la puerta. (I finally managed to open the door.)
• Tenía que estudiar, pero fui al cine. (I was supposed to study, but I went to the cinema.) versus Tuve que estudiar toda la noche. (I had to study all night, and I did.)

The logic is consistent once you see it. The imperfect leaves the state open, so a state of knowing, wanting or being able stays a state. The preterite closes it, and closing a state of not knowing is the moment of finding out; closing a state of being able is the moment of managing it.

One paragraph, converted verb by verb

Here is an English paragraph and the reasoning behind every choice. Work through it slowly; this is the exercise the rest of the course keeps asking you to repeat.

"It was nine in the morning and the market was already full. I was looking for cinnamon when a woman called me. She was selling herbs and she knew my grandmother. We talked for ten minutes. I bought two bunches of mint and she gave me a third one free."

Notice that hablamos diez minutos is preterite even though talking takes time and feels continuous. The ten minutes are stated, which draws a boundary, and a bounded stretch is a closed box.

Change one verb and the meaning flips

Now the second half of the procedure. These pairs differ by one tense and say different things.

• Cuando llegué, ella comía. (When I arrived, she was eating. I walked in mid-meal.)
• Cuando llegué, ella comió. (When I arrived, she ate. My arrival came first, then she ate.)
• El niño no quería dormir. (The child did not want to sleep.)
• El niño no quiso dormir. (The child refused to sleep.)
• Había mucha gente en la plaza. (There were a lot of people in the square: description.)
• Hubo un concierto en la plaza. (A concert took place in the square: an event.)

Common misconceptions

• The preterite is for short actions and the imperfect for long ones. This is the most popular wrong rule in second-year Spanish. Viví en Quito doce años is preterite, and Llovía can describe ten seconds of rain. Length is irrelevant; boundedness is everything.
• Conocí means I knew. It means I met. To say you knew someone, you need conocía.
• Each verb has a correct tense you can memorise. Most verbs take either tense depending on what you are claiming. Estuve and estaba are both good Spanish about the same afternoon.
• English can tell you the answer. Sometimes it can, since "was walking" is reliably imperfect, but English "I ate" maps onto comí or comía depending on the story. Ask what the verb is doing, not what the English looks like.

The short version

One narrative needs both tenses, and the question for each verb is what it contributes. Events that move the story forward go in the preterite; the stage they move across goes in the imperfect, which means weather, clock time, age, appearance, feelings, and whatever was already happening. The interrupted-action pattern is imperfect plus cuando plus preterite; two parallel actions take mientras plus two imperfects; a chain of events takes preterite throughout. Conocer, saber, querer, poder, tener que and haber change their English meaning when they change tense, and the reason is always the same: the preterite closes the state and the closing itself becomes the event. So what?: from here on, you are not conjugating, you are narrating, and the tense is a decision you make about what kind of sentence you want.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Preterite vs imperfect in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Saber vs conocer. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Grammatical aspect. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 23, oposición perfecto simple e imperfecto. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 14, preterite and imperfect contrasted. Routledge.

Ten lines, published in Madrid in 1917 in the enlarged edition of Campos de Castilla, inside a sequence of short poems that Antonio Machado called Proverbios y cantares. You have almost certainly seen the fourth line on a poster. Read the Spanish first, without looking below it.

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

Now the glossary. Notice what it does not give you: a full translation. Reading a poem with a word list is a different skill from decoding it with a crib, and it is the skill that eventually lets you read without either.

What the grammar is doing in these ten lines

Three structures in this poem are worth more than the poem itself, because you will meet all three constantly.

First, se hace camino and se ve la senda. There is no yo, no tú, nobody at all. Spanish can make a sentence with no named doer by putting se in front of a third-person verb, and the result is close to English "one makes" or "the path is seen". You will meet this again on signs and menus: Se habla español (Spanish spoken here), No se permite fumar (No smoking allowed).

Second, al andar and al volver. The formula is al plus an infinitive, and it means upon or when doing something: Al salir, cerré la puerta (On leaving, I closed the door). It is a compact way of saying while or when without a conjugated verb.

Third, la mar. The noun mar is normally masculine, el mar Mediterráneo, but the feminine la mar survives in poetry and in the speech of fishermen along both coasts. It is not an error and not archaic Spanish; it is a live alternative with a different flavour.

Remember: every verb in this poem is in the present. Machado is not telling a story. He is making a claim about how walking works, and a claim that holds at all times goes in the present tense in Spanish exactly as in English.

A note on the numbering

If you go looking for this poem you will find it cited as Proverbios y cantares XXIX in most anthologies, and as number XXVIII in the Poesías completas text that Project Gutenberg distributes. The sequence was published in several versions and the numbers shifted between them, so both citations point at the same ten lines. This is ordinary in literary texts and worth knowing before you assume a source is wrong.

Martí: a story that begins in the present and turns into the past

In the summer of 1889, in New York, José Martí was producing a monthly magazine for children across the Americas called La Edad de Oro. It ran for four issues. In it he printed a long narrative poem about a girl called Pilar, her new shoes, and a sick child on a beach. Here are its first three stanzas.

Hay sol bueno y mar de espuma,
Y arena fina, y Pilar
Quiere salir a estrenar
Su sombrerito de pluma.

Yo voy con mi niña hermosa,
Le dijo la madre buena:
No te manches en la arena
Los zapaticos de rosa.

Fueron las dos al jardín
Por la calle del laurel:
La madre cogió un clavel
Y Pilar cogió un jazmín.

Why the tense changes between stanza two and stanza three

Look at the verbs in order. Stanza one: hay, quiere, both present. Stanza two: voy in the mother's speech, then dijo, a preterite. Stanza three: fueron, cogió, cogió, all preterite.

Martí is doing deliberately what you practised in the last lesson. The first stanza is the stage: sun, foam, sand, a girl who wants to go out. Once the mother speaks, the poem starts moving, and every verb that moves it is preterite. Fueron las dos al jardín is one completed departure. Cogió un clavel is one completed picking.

What matters here: the tense choice you were taught as a grammar rule is what a poet actually uses to control the speed of a story. Description holds still in the present or the imperfect; events run in the preterite.

Two more things to collect from these stanzas. Le dijo la madre contains le, an indirect object pronoun meaning to her, which is the subject of a later lesson; the word order, with the subject after the verb, is completely normal in Spanish and especially in verse. And sombrerito and zapaticos are diminutives, built with -ito or -ico, which add smallness and often affection. A Spanish speaker calling a coffee un cafecito is not measuring it.

How to read a poem you do not fully understand

1. Read it aloud once without stopping. Do not look anything up. Let the rhythm tell you where the sentences end.
2. Find the verbs. Mark each one with its tense. In these two poems that single step gives you most of the meaning.
3. Identify who is doing what to whom. Spanish word order moves freely, so the subject may follow the verb.
4. Look up only the words blocking a whole line. Guess the rest from context and move on.
5. Read it aloud again. Accept that some lines stay dark. Native readers also live with that.

Common misconceptions

• You have to understand every word before a poem counts as read. You do not, and waiting for full comprehension is how people stop reading in a second language. Partial reading repeated often beats perfect reading done once.
• La mar is a printing error. It is a standard feminine use of a normally masculine noun, alive in poetry and in coastal speech.
• Diminutives only mean small. They carry affection, politeness, modesty and sometimes irony. Zapaticos are not necessarily tiny shoes; they are the shoes of a child the poet loves.
• Poetry uses special tenses. It uses the same tenses you are learning, for the same reasons, which is why these two poems are usable as grammar evidence.

What you now know

You have read two real Spanish poems with a glossary rather than a translation. From Machado: the impersonal se that makes a sentence with no named doer, al plus infinitive for upon doing something, sino after a negative, and the poetic la mar. From Martí: the diminutive in -ito and -ico, the verb estrenar that English needs a phrase for, and a clean demonstration of the present holding a scene still before the preterite sets it moving. You also know a reading procedure: read aloud, mark the verbs, find who acts on whom, look up only what blocks a line, read aloud again. A third text, eight lines of Federico García Lorca, waits for you in the final lesson, where you will use it as a model for writing your own story.

Sources

1. Machado, A. (1917). Poesías completas, Proverbios y cantares. Project Gutenberg edition. gutenberg.org
2. Martí, J. (1889). Los zapaticos de rosa. In La Edad de Oro. Project Gutenberg edition. gutenberg.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Antonio Machado. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapters 28 and 38, se constructions and diminutives. Routledge.

Here is a real shape of writing, seventy-one words long, that you can produce by the end of this lesson.

Querida Ana:
¡Saludos desde Granada! Llegué el martes por la noche y el autobús tardó seis horas. El miércoles subí al Albaicín y vi la Alhambra desde arriba. Ayer comí en un bar donde te dan una tapa gratis con cada bebida. Hoy hace sol y estoy sentada en una plaza pequeña escribiéndote esto. El domingo vuelvo a casa.
Un abrazo muy fuerte,
Lucía

(Dear Ana: Greetings from Granada! I arrived on Tuesday night and the bus took six hours. On Wednesday I went up to the Albaicin and saw the Alhambra from above. Yesterday I ate in a bar where they give you a free tapa with each drink. Today it is sunny and I am sitting in a small square writing this to you. On Sunday I go home. A big hug, Lucia.)

Look at what that little text is doing with tense. The body is preterite, because a postcard is a list of events. Two sentences break into the present because they describe now: hace sol and estoy sentada. One sentence uses the present for a future plan, el domingo vuelvo, exactly as Spanish I taught you. Three tenses, seventy-one words, and no mistakes.

The five parts, in order

The greeting is the first place a draft goes wrong, because querido is an adjective and agrees with the person you are writing to: Querida Ana, Querido Luis, Queridos abuelos. If you are writing to a teacher or anybody you address as usted, switch the whole register: Estimado profesor Ruiz: and close with Un saludo cordial or Atentamente.

The upshot: a Spanish postcard is not a translated English one. The colon after the name, the agreement in querido, and the preterite body are all fixed, and getting those three right makes the rest read as natural writing.

The vocabulary you actually need on the road

Two of those pairs are worth noticing as a fact about the language rather than as vocabulary. Spain says billete and sello; Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and most of the rest say boleto and estampilla. Neither is more correct. Choose the set that belongs to the country you are writing from, and be consistent inside one text.

Asking for and giving directions

Real commands come in a later lesson. Everything here is present tense or an impersonal phrase, which is enough to survive any city.

• Perdone, ¿cómo llego a la estación? (Excuse me, how do I get to the station?)
• ¿Dónde está la parada del autobús? (Where is the bus stop?)
• ¿Está lejos de aquí? (Is it far from here?)
• Está a dos cuadras, al lado del banco. (It is two blocks away, next to the bank.)
• Hay que seguir recto hasta la plaza y luego cruzar. (You have to go straight on to the square and then cross.)
• Se dobla a la izquierda en la segunda esquina. (You turn left at the second corner.)
• Está enfrente de la catedral, detrás del mercado. (It is opposite the cathedral, behind the market.)

Collect the position words as a set, because they never change: al lado de (next to), enfrente de (opposite), detrás de (behind), delante de (in front of), cerca de (near), lejos de (far from), entre (between), hasta (as far as, until). Each one keeps its de, and de plus el contracts to del: al lado del banco.

A draft, and the same draft marked

This is a genuine kind of first attempt, written by somebody with your exact vocabulary. Read it and find the errors before you look at the marking.

Querido Ana,
Hola! Yo llego a Madrid en lunes. El metro es muy rápido. Ayer yo visito el Prado y camino en el parque del Retiro. Mañana yo voy a Toledo. Hace mucho calor y yo estoy cansado. Adiós, Marcos

Seven problems. Here they are, numbered, with the repair.

And the marked version, which is what you are aiming to produce first time:

Querida Ana:
¡Hola! Llegué a Madrid el lunes. El metro es muy rápido. Ayer visité el Prado y caminé por el parque del Retiro. Mañana voy a Toledo. Hace mucho calor y estoy cansado. Un abrazo,
Marcos

Notice that Adiós was not wrong, exactly, but nobody signs a postcard with it; it belongs to a doorway, not to a page. And estoy cansado stays masculine because Marcos is writing. Lucía, in the first postcard, wrote estoy sentada.

Five steps for your own

1. Choose one real place and write its name. Vague postcards are hard to write and dull to read.
2. List three things that happened, in English, in three words each. Arrived late. Climbed tower. Ate too much.
3. Turn each into one preterite sentence with a day or time attached.
4. Add one present-tense sentence about right now and one about a plan.
5. Fit a greeting and a closing around it, then check four things: colon after the name, agreement in querido, no stray yo, and inverted marks on every question and exclamation.

Common misconceptions

• Querido is a fixed word like Dear. It is an adjective and it agrees: querida, queridos, queridas.
• Days of the week need a preposition. Spanish uses the article alone: el lunes means on Monday, and los lunes means on Mondays. There is no en.
• You should write yo in every sentence for clarity. Repeated subject pronouns sound heavy and slightly foreign. Use one when you are contrasting: Yo fui al museo, pero él se quedó en el hotel.
• An exclamation only needs a mark at the end. Spanish opens it too: ¡Hola! and ¿Cómo estás? Leaving out the opening mark is the single most visible error in a second-year text.

Pulling it together

A Spanish postcard has five parts: greeting with a colon, an opening line that says where you are, three or four preterite sentences of events, one or two present-tense sentences about now, and a closing formula before your name. Querido agrees with the person; estimado and atentamente replace it when you are on usted terms. Travel vocabulary splits along regional lines that are worth respecting, billete and sello in Spain against boleto and estampilla in most of Latin America. Directions run on a small set of fixed phrases with de: al lado de, enfrente de, cerca de, lejos de. Key idea: writing well in a second language is mostly a matter of knowing the shape you are filling, and the shape here is only five lines long.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Hotel vocabulary in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Madrid Metro. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Tapas. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 34, prepositions of place. Routledge.

A morning in Bogotá, told in eight sentences. Read it before any explanation.

El despertador suena a las seis y veinte. Marcela se despierta, pero no se levanta hasta las seis y media. Se ducha rápido porque el agua caliente se acaba. Se lava los dientes, se viste y se pone una chaqueta, porque a esa hora hace frío en la sabana. Desayuna de pie: café y una arepa. Se peina delante del espejo del pasillo. Sale a las siete y diez y se va al colegio en el TransMilenio.

(The alarm goes off at six twenty. Marcela wakes up, but does not get up until half past six. She showers quickly because the hot water runs out. She brushes her teeth, gets dressed and puts on a jacket, because it is cold on the plateau at that hour. She has breakfast standing up: coffee and an arepa. She combs her hair in front of the hall mirror. She leaves at ten past seven and goes off to school on the TransMilenio.)

Count the little words. Se despierta, se levanta, se ducha, se lava, se viste, se pone, se peina, se va. Eight of them in one paragraph, and only one verb in the whole text, desayuna, manages without. These are reflexive verbs, and the daily routine is where Spanish uses them most densely.

The idea, and the five pronouns

A reflexive verb turns the action back onto the person doing it. Lavo el coche is I wash the car; Me lavo is I wash myself. The verb is unchanged. What changes is the pronoun in front of it, and the pronoun has to match the subject.

The infinitive carries -se on the end as a signal: levantarse, ducharse, irse. That -se is not part of the conjugated verb, it is the third-person pronoun sitting in the dictionary form, and it changes to match whoever is doing the action.

The point: leaving the pronoun out does not make a smaller mistake, it makes a different sentence. Levanto a las siete says I lift something at seven and leaves the listener waiting to hear what. Me levanto a las siete is I get up at seven.

Where the pronoun goes

Three positions, and you already have two of them from the paragraph above.

• Before a conjugated verb. Me ducho por la mañana. (I shower in the morning.) Nothing may come between the pronoun and the verb except no: No me ducho por la noche.
• Attached to an infinitive. Voy a acostarme temprano. (I am going to go to bed early.) You may also move it forward: Me voy a acostar temprano. Both are correct and both are common.
• Attached to a gerund. Estoy duchándome. (I am showering.) Or moved forward: Me estoy duchando. When it attaches, the word gains a syllable and needs a written accent to keep the original stress: duchando becomes duchándome.

The routine, from the alarm to the light going out

Note that desayunar, comer and cenar are not reflexive. Neither is salir. A learner who decides that everything in a morning routine takes a pronoun will produce me desayuno, which no one says.

The article, not the possessive

Here is a rule English speakers break every single time for about a year. With body parts and clothing, once the reflexive pronoun has told you whose they are, Spanish uses the definite article, not a possessive.

• Me lavo las manos. (I wash my hands.) Not mis manos.
• Se quitó los zapatos. (He took off his shoes.) Not sus zapatos.
• Nos cepillamos los dientes. (We brush our teeth.)
• ¿Te pones la chaqueta? (Are you putting your jacket on?)

The logic is that me has already answered the question whose, so repeating it with mis would be saying it twice. Useful body vocabulary while you are here: la cabeza (head), el pelo (hair), la cara (face), los ojos (eyes), los dientes (teeth), las manos (hands), los pies (feet), la espalda (back).

Same verb, different meaning

Some verbs exist in both forms and mean noticeably different things. This is not a technicality; it is where reflexives stop being about washing.

Worth holding on to: me voy does not mean I go myself. Once a verb takes its reflexive form, treat it as a separate dictionary entry with its own meaning.

Each other

With nos and se, the same pronouns can mean each other rather than themselves, and context settles which. Nos vemos el jueves is we see each other on Thursday, which is also how Spanish says see you Thursday. Se escriben todos los días is they write to each other every day. Ana y Luis se conocieron en Cusco is Ana and Luis met each other in Cusco, and note the preterite of conocer doing exactly what the last module said it would.

The routine in the past

Reflexive verbs behave normally in both past tenses; only the pronoun stays put in front. Compare a habit with an event:

• De niña me levantaba a las seis todos los días. (As a child I got up at six every day: habit, imperfect.)
• Ayer me levanté a las once. (Yesterday I got up at eleven: one event, preterite.)
• Se durmió en el autobús y se pasó de parada. (He fell asleep on the bus and missed his stop.)
• Mientras nos vestíamos, sonó el teléfono. (While we were getting dressed, the phone rang.)

Common misconceptions

• Reflexive always means literally to oneself. Irse, quedarse and acordarse show it does not. Many reflexives just mark a change of state or a shift in meaning.
• Se is always a reflexive pronoun. You have already met the impersonal se in Machado's poem, and a third se appears two lessons from now, when le turns into se in front of another pronoun.
• Me lavo mis manos is more precise. It is wrong. Spanish uses the article, because me has already established whose hands they are.
• The pronoun can float anywhere. Only two positions exist for a conjugated verb plus infinitive, and nothing except no may sit between the pronoun and a conjugated verb.

Where this leaves us

Reflexive verbs pair a verb with a pronoun that matches its subject: me, te, se, nos, os, se. The pronoun goes before a conjugated verb, or attaches to an infinitive or gerund, and attaching it adds a syllable that usually requires a written accent. The daily routine is built almost entirely from them, from despertarse to dormirse, though desayunar and salir are not among them. With body parts and clothing, use the definite article rather than a possessive. Many verbs change meaning in their reflexive form, so dormirse is to fall asleep and irse is to leave. Nos and se can also mean each other. Next: the pronouns that replace the thing being acted on, and the little a that Spanish puts in front of people.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Reflexive verbs and reflexive pronouns. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Reflexive verb. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish pronouns. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 41, construcciones reflexivas. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 26, pronominal verbs. Routledge.

A chalkboard outside a bar in Madrid, on a Tuesday at one o'clock:

MENÚ DEL DÍA 14 euros. Primero: ensalada mixta, lentejas, sopa de pescado. Segundo: pollo asado, merluza, tortilla. Pan, bebida y postre o café incluidos. (Set lunch, 14 euros. First course: mixed salad, lentils, fish soup. Second course: roast chicken, hake, omelette. Bread, a drink and dessert or coffee included.)

Now the conversation that follows, written the way a first-year student would write it.

Camarero: ¿Quiere usted la sopa? Cliente: Sí, quiero la sopa. Camarero: ¿Y el pollo? Cliente: Sí, quiero el pollo. Camarero: ¿Toma el postre o el café? Cliente: Tomo el café.

Every sentence is correct. All of it is unusable, because no human being repeats the noun that was just said. A Spanish speaker answers: Sí, la quiero. Sí, lo quiero. Tomo el café, gracias. The nouns have been swallowed by two small words, and this lesson is about how they work.

What counts as a direct object

The direct object is whatever receives the action of the verb. Find it by asking what or whom after the verb. In Compré el libro, ask compré what, and the answer, el libro, is the direct object. In Vi a Marta, ask vi whom, and the answer is Marta.

Some verbs never take one. Ir, llegar, salir and dormir do not act on anything, so nothing can be replaced by these pronouns. Verbs like transitive verbs such as comprar, ver, comer, leer, llamar and querer do act on something, and those are the ones this lesson works with.

The six pronouns

The third-person pronouns agree with the noun they replace, in gender and number, and nothing else decides them. El pollo is masculine, so it comes back as lo. La sopa is feminine, so it comes back as la. Las lentejas is feminine plural, so it comes back as las: ¿Las lentejas? Las tomo siempre. (The lentils? I always have them.)

In short: the pronoun looks backwards at the noun it replaced, not at the person speaking. This is why a man says La compré about a shirt, la camisa, without any awkwardness.

Where it goes, which is not where English puts it

English puts the object after the verb: I bought it. Spanish puts it in front of a conjugated verb, and this is the single hardest habit to build in this lesson.

• Lo compré. (I bought it.) Never Compré lo.
• No la conozco. (I do not know her.) The no comes before the pronoun.
• ¿Los tienes? (Do you have them?) The pronoun stays in front even in a question.

With an infinitive or a gerund, you get a choice, and both options are equally correct:

• Voy a pedirlo. or Lo voy a pedir. (I am going to order it.)
• Estoy leyéndolo. or Lo estoy leyendo. (I am reading it.) Attaching adds a syllable, so leyendo takes an accent when it becomes leyéndolo.
• Prefiero hacerlo mañana. (I prefer to do it tomorrow.)

The neutral lo

One more use, and it is everywhere in speech. Lo can point at a whole idea rather than a noun, where English uses it or nothing at all.

• Lo sé. (I know.)
• No lo creo. (I do not believe it.)
• Lo siento. (I am sorry: literally I feel it.)
• Te lo prometo. (I promise you.)

The personal a

Spanish marks a direct object that is a person by putting a in front of it. There is no equivalent in English, so there is nothing to translate and nothing to remind you.

Three details finish the rule. It also appears before alguien, nadie and specific pets: No vi a nadie (I saw nobody), Perdí a mi perro (I lost my dog). It disappears after tener when you are simply counting: Tengo dos hermanos, never Tengo a dos hermanos. And it has nothing to do with the a that means to; this one is a grammatical marker, which linguists call differential object marking, and Spanish is one of the languages best known for it.

So what?: without the personal a, Vi María reads to a Spanish ear roughly as I saw Maria as an object on a shelf. The a is what marks her as a person being seen.

Lunch, done properly

The menú del día is a weekday institution in Spain: a fixed-price lunch, usually served roughly between one thirty and four, with a first course, a second course, bread, a drink and dessert or coffee. It exists because the midday meal is the large one. Here is the conversation again, with pronouns, and a few more turns.

• Camarero: ¿Qué va a tomar de primero? (What will you have as a first course?)
• Cliente: La sopa de pescado, por favor. (The fish soup, please.)
• Camarero: ¿Y de segundo, la merluza? (And as a second course, the hake?)
• Cliente: No, no la quiero. Prefiero el pollo. (No, I do not want it. I prefer the chicken.)
• Camarero: ¿Se lo traigo con patatas? (Shall I bring it to you with potatoes?)
• Cliente: Sí, gracias. ¿El postre está incluido? (Yes, thank you. Is dessert included?)
• Cliente: La cuenta, por favor. ¿Puedo pagar con tarjeta? (The bill, please. Can I pay by card?)

You will have noticed se lo traigo and wondered what se is doing there. That is two pronouns in one sentence, and it is exactly where the next lesson starts.

Common misconceptions

• Lo means it and la means her. Both can mean it. The choice is made by the gender of the noun being replaced, not by whether it is a person.
• The pronoun follows the verb, as in English. Before a conjugated verb, always. Attached to the end only for infinitives, gerunds and, later, affirmative commands.
• The personal a means to. It has no meaning at all. It is a marker that the object is human.
• Every a before a person is the personal a. In Le di el libro a María, that a marks the person receiving, which is a different job, and the subject of the next lesson.

What to remember

A direct object receives the action, and Spanish replaces it with me, te, lo, la, nos, os, los or las. The third-person forms agree with the noun they replace, so el pollo becomes lo and las lentejas becomes las. Put the pronoun before a conjugated verb, including in questions and after no, or attach it to an infinitive or gerund, adding a written accent when attaching moves the stress. The neutral lo refers to a whole idea, which is what makes lo sé and lo siento work. A direct object that is a person, or alguien, or nadie, or a beloved pet, takes the personal a, which carries no meaning and disappears after tener when you are counting.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Direct object pronouns in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Differential object marking. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Menú del día. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapters 11 and 22, personal a and object pronouns. Routledge.

A student, following the rules carefully, wrote this sentence about a photograph she gave her aunt:

Le lo regalé a mi tía.

The reasoning behind it is good. The aunt receives, so she needs le. The photograph is the thing given, it is masculine, el retrato, so it needs lo. Indirect before direct, which is the correct order. Four correct decisions, and the sentence is still impossible: no Spanish speaker has ever said le lo. The correct version is Se lo regalé a mi tía. This lesson traces where that reasoning goes wrong, and everything else follows from the repair.

First, the pronoun the student got right

An indirect object is the person who receives something, or for whose benefit the action happens. Ask to whom or for whom after the verb. In Escribí una carta a mi abuelo, the letter is the direct object and the grandfather is the indirect one.

Notice what is missing: gender. Le covers him, her and you formal; les covers them of any mix. This is the opposite of the direct object pronouns, where lo and la are carefully distinguished, and it is the first thing to fix in your head.

You have been using these since last year without being told. Me gusta el chocolate is literally chocolate is pleasing to me, and that me is an indirect object pronoun. So are the ones in te duele la cabeza (your head hurts), nos falta pan (we are short of bread) and le interesa la historia (history interests him).

The pronoun stays even when the noun is there

This is the feature that strikes English speakers as redundant, and it is not optional. When the recipient is named with a plus a noun, the matching pronoun appears anyway.

• Le di el libro a María. (I gave the book to Maria.) Di el libro a María sounds incomplete.
• Les conté la noticia a mis padres. (I told my parents the news.)
• ¿Le pediste permiso al profesor? (Did you ask the teacher for permission?)

Why this matters: the doubled pronoun is how Spanish signals that the a phrase is a recipient rather than a destination or a personal a. Drop it and the sentence loses its footing, even though the words are all present.

The a phrase is also how you clear up the ambiguity that le creates. Since le is him, her and you all at once, Le escribí could be any of the three, so speakers add a ella, a él or a usted whenever it matters: Le escribí a ella, no a él.

Now the mistake: two pronouns in the same sentence

When both objects become pronouns, the order is fixed: indirect first, direct second. That part of the student's reasoning was right.

The last row is the repair. Le and les cannot stand in front of lo, la, los or las. Both become se. Spanish will not put two l pronouns in a row, so le lo, le la, les los and les las simply do not exist as Spanish, and se takes over the job.

This is a third, separate se. You have now met the reflexive se, the impersonal se from Machado's poem, and this one, which is only a disguised le. They look identical and do unrelated work, which is why the word se is the single most overloaded item in the language.

Because se has swallowed the information about who received, the a phrase becomes much more useful:

• Se lo di a ella. (I gave it to her.)
• Se lo di a ellos. (I gave it to them.)
• Se lo expliqué a usted ayer. (I explained it to you yesterday.)

Attaching two pronouns at once

The same two positions apply as before, and when both pronouns attach, an accent is always needed.

• Voy a dárselo. or Se lo voy a dar. (I am going to give it to him.) Dar becomes dárselo: two extra syllables, so the stress must be marked.
• Está explicándomelo. or Me lo está explicando. (He is explaining it to me.)
• Prefiero mandárselas por correo. (I prefer to send them to her by post.)

An ofrenda, which is built entirely out of giving

On the first and second of November, households across Mexico build an ofrenda, an offering table for their dead, for Día de Muertos. Every sentence describing one wants an indirect object pronoun, because every object on the table is for somebody.

• Le ponemos su foto a mi abuela, en el centro. (We put my grandmother's photo in the middle for her.)
• Les dejamos agua y sal a los muertos. (We leave water and salt for the dead.)
• A mi tío le gustaba el mole, así que se lo servimos en un plato. (My uncle liked mole, so we serve it to him on a plate.)
• Mi madre le compra pan de muerto al panadero de la esquina. (My mother buys pan de muerto from the baker on the corner for him.)
• Les cortamos papel picado a los niños para decorar. (We cut papel picado for the children to decorate with.)

The flowers are cempasúchil, the orange marigolds whose scent is said to guide the dead home; the cut paper banners are papel picado; the sugar skulls are calaveras, and a living person's name is often written across one as a joke. The sweet bread is pan de muerto.

Common misconceptions

• Le lo and les las are valid if the order is right. They are not Spanish. Any le or les in front of a direct object pronoun becomes se.
• Le is masculine and la is feminine. Le has no gender at all. The gendered pair is lo and la, which are direct objects.
• If you name the person, the pronoun is unnecessary. Spanish keeps both: Le di el libro a María.
• Se always means something reflexive. In se lo di nothing is reflexive; the se is standing in for le.

The takeaway

The indirect object is the receiver, and its pronouns are me, te, le, nos, os, les, with no gender in the third person. They appear even when the recipient is also named with a, and that a phrase is what disambiguates le and se. When two object pronouns meet, the indirect one comes first, and le or les turns into se in front of lo, la, los or las, which is why the student's carefully reasoned le lo had to become se lo. Attaching both pronouns to an infinitive or gerund always forces a written accent: dárselo, explicándomelo. Bottom line: Spanish marks the receiver twice and the giver not at all, which is the reverse of the English habit, and once you expect that, sentences like se lo regalé a mi tía stop looking crowded.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Indirect object pronouns. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Direct and indirect object pronouns together. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ofrenda. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 16, pronombres personales átonos. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 12, object pronoun combinations. Routledge.

A recipe for tortilla de patatas, written the way a Spanish friend would text it to you.

Pela seis patatas y córtalas en láminas finas. Calienta bastante aceite de oliva en una sartén. Fríelas despacio, a fuego medio, unos veinte minutos. No las doses. Escúrrelas bien. Bate seis huevos en un bol grande, añade las patatas y sal, y espera cinco minutos. Vierte todo en la sartén. Cuaja la tortilla dos minutos. Pon un plato encima y dale la vuelta. No la dejes seca por dentro.

(Peel six potatoes and cut them into thin slices. Heat plenty of olive oil in a pan. Fry them slowly, over medium heat, about twenty minutes. Do not brown them. Drain them well. Beat six eggs in a big bowl, add the potatoes and salt, and wait five minutes. Pour everything into the pan. Set the tortilla for two minutes. Put a plate on top and flip it. Do not leave it dry inside.)

Fourteen commands in one paragraph, some affirmative, some negative, several with pronouns hanging off the end. Recipes are pure imperative, which makes them the best place to learn this. By the end of the lesson you will be able to write that recipe three ways: for a friend, for a stranger, and for somebody in Buenos Aires.

Affirmative tú commands, which you already know

To tell a friend to do something, use the él form of the present tense. That is the entire rule.

Stem changes carry over, as cierra, vuelve and pide show, because the form you are borrowing is the one that already has them.

Eight verbs refuse this and have short, blunt command forms of their own. Learn them as a block; between them they cover most of what anybody ever tells anybody to do.

Negative tú commands, which are a different word

Here is the trap. You cannot make a negative command by putting no in front of the affirmative one. No habla means he does not speak. The negative command needs a different form, built in three steps.

1. Take the yo form of the present: hablo, como, pongo, digo, salgo.
2. Drop the -o: habl-, com-, pong-, dig-, salg-.
3. Add the opposite vowel plus s. An -ar verb takes -es; an -er or -ir verb takes -as.

Notice how the irregular yo forms rescue you: because the stem comes from pongo and digo, the irregularity is already built in. Five verbs have no -o yo form to borrow, so they are memorised: no des (dar), no estés (estar), no seas (ser), no vayas (ir), no sepas (saber).

Remember: these forms are the present subjunctive, which arrives properly in two lessons. You are learning it here as a set of commands first, which is how children learn it too.

Usted and ustedes: the same forms, one letter apart

Formal commands use those same opposite-vowel forms, positive and negative alike. Add -n for the plural.

A doctor's surgery runs almost entirely on these: Pase, siéntese y dígame qué le duele. (Come in, sit down and tell me what hurts.) Respire hondo. Abra la boca. No se preocupe, no es grave. (Breathe deeply. Open your mouth. Do not worry, it is not serious.) Note the medical vocabulary while it is in front of you: me duele la garganta (my throat hurts), tengo fiebre (I have a fever), estoy mareado (I feel dizzy), la receta (the prescription).

Where the pronouns go

One rule, two directions, and it applies to reflexive, direct and indirect pronouns equally.

• Affirmative: attach to the end. Hazlo. (Do it.) Dímelo. (Tell me it.) Siéntese. (Sit down.) Levántate. (Get up.) Tráiganoslas. (Bring them to us.)
• Negative: put them in front, after no. No lo hagas. (Do not do it.) No me lo digas. (Do not tell me.) No se siente. (Do not sit down.) No te levantes. (Do not get up.)

Attaching lengthens the word, so the stress has to be written in almost every case: siéntese, levántate, dímelo, póngalas, escúrrelas. The exceptions are short one-syllable commands that gain only one pronoun: hazlo, dilo, ponlo need none.

Key idea: affirmative pushes pronouns onto the end of the verb, negative pulls them out in front. Nothing else in Spanish behaves this way, which is why command sentences look so different from everything around them.

The same recipe, three ways

Now the payoff. Here are four lines of the tortilla recipe in each register.

That third column is voseo, the use of vos instead of tú, which is normal everyday speech in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, much of Central America and parts of Colombia. Its affirmative command is easy: drop the r from the infinitive and stress the last syllable. Hablar gives hablá, comer gives comé, venir gives vení, decir gives decí, hacer gives hacé. There are no stem changes at all, which is why pensá and volvé look so unfamiliar. The negative forms are the same as the tú ones you already learned. In Buenos Aires you will hear vení, mirá, tomá, dale all day. It is not slang and not incorrect; it is the local standard, and dictionaries and school textbooks in those countries teach it.

Softening the order

Spanish commands are not rude, but they are direct, and there are gentler options for asking a favour. Por favor attaches to anything. A question with the present tense is softer still: ¿Me pasas la sal? (Will you pass me the salt?) And ¿Puedes ayudarme? or the formal ¿Podría ayudarme? (Could you help me?) are the politest of all.

Common misconceptions

• A negative command is no plus the affirmative one. No come means he does not eat. You need No comas, a different form entirely.
• Commands are impolite. Spanish uses them constantly with friends and family. Politeness comes from the register you choose and from por favor, not from avoiding the imperative.
• Pronouns always attach to commands. Only to affirmative ones. Negative commands put them in front.
• Voseo is careless Spanish. It is the standard spoken form for tens of millions of people and appears in newspapers, advertising and school materials across the River Plate region.

Summing up

Affirmative tú commands are the él form of the present, apart from di, haz, ve, pon, sal, sé, ten and ven. Negative tú commands, and all usted and ustedes commands, are built from the yo form with the opposite vowel: hables, comas, ponga, vengan, plus the five memorised forms dé, esté, sea, vaya and sepa. Pronouns attach to the end of affirmative commands, forcing a written accent in almost every case, and stand in front of negative ones. Vos commands drop the r of the infinitive and stress the final syllable, with no stem changes. Those opposite-vowel forms are the present subjunctive wearing a different hat, and in two lessons you will meet them in their own right.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Commands. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Voseo. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Imperative mood. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, capítulo 42, el imperativo. Espasa.
5. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 17, the imperative. Routledge.

Two laptops in a shop window on the Gran Vía in Madrid, each with a printed card propped against the screen.

Price, weight, battery, screen, memory, warranty, with the Spanish comma inside 1,8 kg where English writes a point. Every row is a sentence waiting to be said, and Spanish has three shapes for it: one thing beats the other, the two match, or one beats everything in the shop. This lesson is that card, read three ways.

Más que and menos que, when the two sides differ

The frame is más or menos, then the word you are measuring with, then que. What sits in the middle can be an adjective, an adverb or a noun. The frame itself never changes.

Two things to catch. The adjective still agrees with its noun, so a feminine subject gives más cara: Esta tableta es más cara que aquella. (This tablet is more expensive than that one.) And English hides the comparison inside the word itself, in faster, bigger, cheaper. Spanish never does. There is no single word for cheaper; there is más barato, and the que becomes compulsory the moment a second thing enters.

The tech and school vocabulary of this lesson slots straight into the frame: la pantalla (screen), el teclado (keyboard), la batería (battery), el archivo (file), la contraseña (password), descargar (to download), la asignatura (school subject), el horario (timetable), la nota (grade), los apuntes (class notes), el aula (classroom).

Tan como and tanto como, when the two sides match

Row three of the card gives both machines eight hours of battery, so the inequality frame is no use. The matching frame splits three ways depending on what is being matched.

The point: tan never touches a noun, and tanto never touches an adjective. Look at the word that follows the gap. Adjective or adverb, you need tan. Noun, you need tanto and it has to agree with that noun in gender and number. Straight after a verb, with nothing in between, tanto freezes: estudio tanto como tú, never estudio tantos como tú.

The four comparatives that refuse the frame

Four common adjectives have their own comparative word and never take más. Saying más bueno for better marks you out immediately.

All four have one form for both genders and add -es in the plural: mejores notas, peores resultados, mis hermanos mayores. Mejor and peor double as adverbs, so Canto mejor que antes (I sing better than before) needs no change at all.

Grande and pequeño keep the ordinary frame when you mean physical size: Mi casa es más grande que la tuya. (My house is bigger than yours.) Reach for mayor and menor when the subject is a person's age, or when the thing being measured is an abstract quantity: un número mayor que diez (a number greater than ten). One leftover: más bueno survives for moral goodness, which is why a Spanish speaker calls a kind person más bueno que el pan, literally kinder than bread.

Que or de? The rule that turns on a number

Put a number after the comparison and que disappears. You need de.

• Hay más de treinta alumnos en mi clase. (There are more than thirty students in my class.)
• El examen dura menos de dos horas. (The exam lasts less than two hours.)
• Ese portátil cuesta más de mil euros. (That laptop costs more than a thousand euros.)

Que stays for everything that is not a bare quantity, including a second noun: Hay más alumnos que sillas. (There are more students than chairs.) One idiom falls straight out of this rule and catches everybody. No tengo más que cinco euros does not mean I have over five euros; with a negative in front, más que means only, so the sentence is I have only five euros. No tengo más de cinco euros is the plain comparison: five at most. The two sentences differ by one letter and say different things.

The superlative, and the preposition English speakers get wrong

To single one thing out of a group, put the definite article in front of the whole comparison and finish with de.

The trap is that last preposition. English says the best in the class and the highest in the Americas, and beginners translate in as en. Spanish uses de. The Aconcagua, in the Argentine province of Mendoza, is la montaña más alta de América, 6.967 metros high, which also makes it the highest summit anywhere outside Asia. Not en América. De.

When the noun is obvious from context you drop it and keep the article: Este es el mejor. (This one is the best.) And when the article meets de el, Spanish contracts it, which is why the third example above reads del trimestre and not de el trimestre.

-ísimo, the superlative you can hear

There is a second superlative that compares the thing with nothing at all. It simply turns the dial up. Drop the final vowel of the adjective and add -ísimo, always with a written accent on the í.

Those spelling changes are the ones you met in the preterite of buscar, pagar and empezar: Spanish is protecting the sound, not the letter. The finished form agrees like any other adjective: una paella riquísima, unos exámenes dificilísimos.

A few adjectives also kept superlatives inherited from Latin: bueno gives óptimo, malo gives pésimo, grande gives máximo, pequeño gives mínimo. You meet these in a weather bulletin, in la temperatura máxima, more often than in conversation.

Reading the card

Back to the shop window. Here is the whole card turned into Spanish, with every pattern from this lesson inside it.

El modelo B es más caro que el A: cuesta 899 euros, doscientos cincuenta más. A cambio pesa menos, 1,2 kg frente a 1,8. Los dos llevan la misma pantalla, así que el A es tan cómodo de leer como el B, y su batería dura tanto como la del B. El B tiene el doble de memoria y una garantía más larga. Para un estudiante que carga la mochila todos los días, el B es la mejor opción de la tienda, aunque sea carísimo.

(Model B is more expensive than A: it costs 899 euros, two hundred and fifty more. In exchange it weighs less, 1.2 kg against 1.8. The two carry the same screen, so A is as comfortable to read as B, and its battery lasts as long as B's. B has twice the memory and a longer warranty. For a student who carries a backpack every day, B is the best option in the shop, even if it is outrageously expensive.)

Worth holding on to: el doble de is how Spanish says twice the, and it takes de rather than que: el doble de memoria, el triple de trabajo. It behaves like a number, and numbers take de.

Common misconceptions

• Spanish has an ending like English -er. It does not. Cheaper is más barato, two words, and the que arrives with the second thing.
• Tan and tanto are the same word in two spellings. Tan goes with adjectives and adverbs and never changes. Tanto goes with nouns and agrees with them, or sits after a verb and freezes.
• Más que works before numbers. Before a bare quantity it is más de: más de treinta alumnos.
• The best in the class is el mejor en la clase. Spanish closes a superlative with de: el mejor de la clase.
• Mayor simply means bigger. Of people it is about age. A five-year-old who is tall for her age is más grande, not mayor.

What to carry forward

Three frames cover almost everything. Más o menos + word + que when the two sides differ, with de instead of que in front of a number. Tan + adjective or adverb + como, tanto, tanta, tantos, tantas + noun + como, or plain verb + tanto como, when they match. Article + más or menos + adjective + de when one item beats the whole group, with de el contracting to del. Four adjectives sit outside all of it, mejor, peor, mayor and menor, and grande keeps más grande for physical size. On top sits -ísimo, which compares with nothing and simply intensifies.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Comparisons of inequality in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Comparisons of equality in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Superlative adjectives in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
4. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). -ísimo. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
5. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2005). Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, entrada más, sobre más de y más que ante numerales. Santillana.

Here is a sentence handed in by a second-year student, with one word crossed out in red.

Mi madre quiere que yo estudio medicina.

Nothing about it looks wrong. The vocabulary is right, the word order is right, and estudio really is the present tense of estudiar for yo. The form Spanish wants is estudie: Mi madre quiere que yo estudie medicina. (My mother wants me to study medicine.) That one letter is the entrance to the subjunctive mood, roughly half of the Spanish verb system and the biggest thing standing between second-year Spanish and a newspaper.

Why the verb has to move

Count the clauses. Mi madre quiere is one, and it reports a fact: she does want something. que yo estudie medicina is the second, and it reports nothing at all. I may never study medicine. The clause does not describe the world; it describes the content of a wish.

Spanish marks that difference on the verb. A tense places an event in time, which is what the preterite and the imperfect did in Module 1. A mood says what the speaker is doing with the event: reporting it (indicative), ordering it (imperative), or holding it at arm's length as something wanted, doubted or feared (subjunctive).

English kept a few fossils of the same thing: I insist that he be present, not is, and If I were you, not was. Spanish never wore its subjunctive down, and uses it constantly.

For this lesson, three conditions have to hold together.

1. Two clauses, joined by que.
2. A different subject on each side of the que.
3. A first verb that wants, asks, advises, orders or forbids.

Why this matters: the subjunctive is not triggered by the future, by uncertainty, or by the word que on its own, but by what the first verb is doing to the second clause. Hold that, and the next lesson costs you almost nothing.

Building the form, which you already did two lessons ago

You met these endings under a different name. No hables. Ponga la mesa. Vengan conmigo. Those were commands, and they were present subjunctive forms all along. The recipe is the same three steps.

1. Take the yo form of the present indicative: hablo, como, vivo.
2. Drop the -o: habl-, com-, viv-.
3. Add the opposite vowel endings. An -ar verb takes e endings; an -er or -ir verb takes a endings.

Notice that -er and -ir verbs are identical all the way down: one set of endings covers both.

Where the irregularity comes from, and why it is free

Because step one borrows the yo form, any verb with a strange yo form hands that strangeness to the whole subjunctive. You inherit irregulars you already own.

(In order: I want you to be careful. He asks us to do the work. I do not allow you to say that. I prefer you to leave early. She hopes they come soon. She wants you to meet her tutor.)

Six verbs with no yo form to borrow

Six high-frequency verbs have a yo form that does not end in -o, or ends in -oy, so step one fails. Their subjunctives are simply memorised, and five of the six you already met as formal commands.

The initials spell DISHES: Dar, Ir, Ser, Haber, Estar, Saber. One spelling note: dé carries a written accent purely to keep it apart from the preposition de, and loses it in demos.

Spelling changes and stem changes

Two familiar adjustments ride along. The -car, -gar and -zar verbs protect their sound in front of an e, as they did in the preterite yo form: buscar gives busque, llegar gives llegue, empezar gives empiece.

Stem changers split by conjugation. An -ar or -er verb changes in the four boot forms and leaves nosotros and vosotros alone, just as it does in the present indicative: pensar gives piense, pienses, piense, pensemos, penséis, piensen. An -ir verb does something extra: it also changes in nosotros and vosotros, with e becoming i and o becoming u.

The verbs that pull the trigger

Here is the working list for wishes and influence. Every one of them, followed by que and a new subject, forces the subjunctive.

Preferir que, necesitar que and insistir en que work the same way.

When the subject does not change

Take the second subject away and the whole apparatus collapses into an infinitive. No que, no subjunctive, nothing.

• Quiero estudiar medicina. (I want to study medicine.) One subject, so an infinitive.
• Quiero que estudies medicina. (I want you to study medicine.) Two subjects, so que plus subjunctive.
• Espero aprobar. (I hope to pass.) Espero que apruebes. (I hope you pass.)

This is where English misleads you. English says I want you to study, an object followed by an infinitive, and there is no Spanish equivalent: Quiero te estudiar and Quiero a ti estudiar are both impossible. When the wanting and the studying belong to different people, Spanish has one route, and it goes through que.

Dejar, permitir, prohibir and mandar escape the rule and allow both patterns: No me dejan salir and No dejan que salga both mean they will not let me go out.

Decir, one verb with two moods

Decir shows the mood doing real work, because the same verb goes both ways depending on what it means. Mi hermano dice que viene a las ocho reports, so it is indicative: my brother says he is coming at eight. Mi hermano dice que vengas a las ocho passes on an instruction, so it is subjunctive: my brother says for you to come at eight. Same verb, same que, and a Spanish listener hears the difference immediately.

Ojalá, and the word that came in from Arabic

Ojalá is the purest trigger there is, because it needs no main verb at all. It comes from the Arabic phrase behind inshallah, if God wills, carried into Spanish during the centuries of Arabic-speaking rule in Iberia, and it now means simply I hope. Que after it is optional: Ojalá apruebes la selectividad (I hope you pass the entrance exam), Ojalá que no llueva el día del examen (I hope it does not rain on exam day).

Careers, bachillerato and the exam everyone still calls la selectividad

In Spain the two years after compulsory schooling are el bachillerato, and they end in a university entrance exam whose name keeps moving. For decades it was la selectividad; in 2017 each autonomous community started calling it the EBAU or the EvAU; and Real Decreto 534/2024 put a single national name back on it, la PAU. Everyone still says selectividad, a useful reminder that official names and living usage are different things.

The vocabulary around it: la carrera (degree course), la nota de corte (the mark a degree demands), la beca (grant), la solicitud (application), la entrevista (interview), el sueldo (salary), el título (qualification), and the jobs themselves, which come in pairs: abogado y abogada, ingeniero e ingeniera, enfermero y enfermera.

In short: put any of those careers into a wish and the machinery runs itself. Mis padres quieren que sea abogada, pero yo espero que me dejen estudiar Enfermería. (My parents want me to be a lawyer, but I hope they let me study Nursing.)

Common misconceptions

• The subjunctive is a tense. It is a mood, and it has its own present, past and perfect tenses inside it. This lesson teaches one of them.
• The subjunctive means the future, or something that has not happened. Se alegra de que estés aquí (she is glad you are here) is subjunctive and describes something that is true right now. What matters is the job the main clause gives the second one.
• Any que triggers it. No. Sé que estudias mucho (I know you study a lot) reports a fact, and reporting takes the indicative.
• The subjunctive is bookish and dying out. It is in every shop, classroom and text message in the Spanish-speaking world. A child says Quiero que me dejes before starting school.

Where this leaves us

The present subjunctive is the yo form of the present, minus the -o, plus the opposite vowel, which is why every quirk of the yo form travels with it and why the formal commands of Module 4 were already subjunctives in disguise. Six verbs, DISHES, have no usable yo form and are learned whole. The -car, -gar and -zar spelling changes and the boot pattern behave as they always do, and -ir stem changers add a change in nosotros and vosotros. The mood is triggered here by wanting, hoping, asking, advising, forbidding and by ojalá, and only when the subject changes across the que. Same subject, and Spanish takes a plain infinitive instead.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). The Spanish present subjunctive. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Subjunctive mood. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Inshallah. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (s. f.). Evaluación de Bachillerato para el Acceso a la Universidad. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
5. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis II, el modo subjuntivo. Espasa.

A student who has understood the last lesson writes this about Sunday mornings in Colombia:

Creo que la Ciclovía sea una idea genial.

The reasoning behind it is easy to reconstruct, and it is almost right. The subjunctive marks things that are not asserted as fact. An opinion is not a fact. So an opinion should take the subjunctive. Every step sounds sensible. The sentence is still wrong, and the correct version is Creo que la Ciclovía es una idea genial. (I think the Ciclovía is a brilliant idea.) Work out why, and the whole of this lesson falls out of it.

Where the reasoning went wrong

The mistake is in the phrase an opinion is not a fact. That is a statement about the world. Spanish does not care about the world here; it cares about what the main clause does with the clause after que. And creo que puts the speaker's weight behind what follows. I think the Ciclovía is brilliant is an assertion: I am telling you this is so. Assertion is the indicative's job.

Now negate it. No creo que la Ciclovía sea una idea genial. (I do not think the Ciclovía is a brilliant idea.) The main clause has stopped asserting and started withholding, so the verb moves into the subjunctive. One word changed in the main clause and the mood of the second clause changed with it.

The upshot: stop asking yourself how sure you feel. Ask what the main clause is doing to the second clause. Asserting it, or wanting, doubting, denying, judging or reacting to it. That single question decides the mood every time.

WEIRDO, and what the mnemonic actually claims

Spanish classrooms teach the trigger families with the word WEIRDO: Wishes, Emotions, Impersonal expressions, Recommendations, Doubt and denial, Ojalá. It is a memory hook rather than a rule of grammar, and it has an obvious hole, since doubt and denial are opposites of each other and impersonal expressions are a sentence shape rather than a meaning. Use it as a shelf to store examples on. Lesson 12 covered the W, the R and the O. This lesson takes the E, the I and the D.

Emotion, the trigger that works even when the fact is certain

Here is the family that most convincingly kills the uncertainty theory.

In the first example you are coming is completely certain. You told me so. The subjunctive appears anyway, because the main clause is not reporting your arrival, it is reacting to it. The fact is already taken for granted; the sentence is about my gladness. That is exactly what not asserted means.

Doubt, denial, and the verbs that flip when you negate them

This family is symmetrical, and the symmetry is worth learning as a pair rather than a list.

(I think he is right. I do not think he is right. I think it is enough. I do not think it is enough. I do not doubt the plan works. I doubt the plan works. I do not deny there is a problem. I deny there is a problem. It is true we recycle little. It is not true that we recycle little. I am sure they are coming. I am not sure they are coming.)

Read down each column and the pattern is plain. Creer, pensar, no dudar, no negar, es verdad and estar seguro all commit the speaker to something, so they take the indicative. Put a no in front of the first three, or take the no away from the others, and the commitment disappears with it.

One practical note: a question can go either way. ¿Crees que es buena idea? asks for an opinion neutrally. ¿Crees que sea buena idea? hints that the speaker has doubts of their own. Both are correct Spanish, and the second is common in Latin America.

Impersonal expressions, and the ones that quietly assert

An impersonal expression is es plus an adjective or a noun, with no person doing anything. Most of them judge, weigh or estimate, and judging is not asserting.

The right-hand column is short and learnable, and all of it does the same thing: it declares something to be so. Es evidente que el transporte público funciona mejor en Bogotá que hace veinte años. (It is obvious that public transport works better in Bogotá than twenty years ago.) Negate any of those and they cross the aisle: No es evidente que funcione mejor.

Two of the left-hand entries are irregular in shape. Puede que never takes a que-less form and never takes the indicative: Puede que llueva el domingo. (It may rain on Sunday.) And es probable que stays subjunctive even though English often translates it with a plain will.

No second subject, no que

The rule from the last lesson still governs everything. If nobody in particular is doing the action, the impersonal expression takes a bare infinitive and the que vanishes.

• Es importante reciclar. (It is important to recycle.) A general truth, nobody named.
• Es importante que recicles. (It is important that you recycle.) A named subject, so que plus subjunctive.
• Es mejor ir en bici. (It is better to cycle.) Es mejor que vayamos en bici. (It is better that we cycle.)

Quizás, tal vez, puede que, a lo mejor

Four ways to say maybe, and they do not behave alike. Quizá, quizás and tal vez accept either mood: the subjunctive leans towards real doubt, the indicative towards something the speaker half expects. Quizás venga. (Maybe he will come, but I doubt it.) Quizás viene. (Maybe he is coming, I would not be surprised.) Puede que is always subjunctive. A lo mejor, which is the most colloquial of the four, is always indicative: A lo mejor vamos al centro esta tarde. (Maybe we will go into town this afternoon.)

One position rule worth having: quizás and tal vez only take the subjunctive when they come before the verb. Put them after and the indicative returns. Viene, tal vez, el domingo.

Sunday morning in Bogotá, in both moods

Every Sunday and public holiday, from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, Bogotá closes more than 120 kilometres of its streets to cars for the Ciclovía, which began in December 1974 and now draws around two million people, roughly a fifth of the city. Here is the same event described eight ways, four asserting and four not.

(I know the Ciclovía starts at seven. I do not think it starts before seven. It is true they close over 120 kilometres. It is incredible that they close over 120 kilometres. It is clear people prefer the bike. I am glad people prefer the bike. It seems there is less pollution on Sundays. It is likely there is less pollution on Sundays.)

Notice the second row. The facts in both sentences are identical and both speakers believe them. Only the main clause differs, and it changes everything after que.

Bottom line: the mood lives in the main clause. Cover the second half of any Spanish sentence and you should still be able to predict what comes next.

Common misconceptions

• The subjunctive means the speaker is unsure. Me alegro de que estés aquí is subjunctive and you are demonstrably here. The mood tracks what the main clause does, not the speaker's confidence.
• Opinions take the subjunctive because they are only opinions. Creo que, pienso que and me parece que all assert, so they take the indicative. Only the negative versions withhold.
• Every expression beginning with es takes the subjunctive. Es verdad que, es evidente que, es obvio que and está claro que are declarations, and declarations take the indicative until you negate them.
• Maybe always means subjunctive. A lo mejor never takes it, quizás and tal vez take either, and puede que always does.
• Es importante que reciclar is a way of being general. Choose one route or the other: es importante reciclar with no que, or es importante que recicles with a subject.

Putting it together

Emotion, doubt, denial and impersonal judgement all withhold assertion, so all of them take the subjunctive after que with a new subject. Their opposites assert, so creer, pensar, no dudar, no negar, es verdad, es evidente, está claro and parece take the indicative, and negating any of them flips the mood of the clause that follows. Emotion is the family that proves the rule is about assertion rather than certainty, since it triggers the subjunctive over facts nobody disputes. With no second subject, impersonal expressions take a bare infinitive and lose the que entirely. Among the four words for maybe, puede que is always subjunctive, a lo mejor is always indicative, and quizás and tal vez take whichever mood matches how much the speaker is prepared to commit.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Subjunctive vs. indicative in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Expressing doubt and denial with the subjunctive. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Impersonal expressions with the subjunctive. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ciclovía. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2005). Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, entrada quizá(s), sobre el modo del verbo siguiente. Santillana.

A traveller at Madrid Atocha with a ticket to Cádiz can say both of these, and they are not the same sentence.

Salgo para Cádiz a las nueve. (I leave for Cádiz at nine.)
Paso por Córdoba y por Sevilla. (I go through Córdoba and Seville.)

English uses for in the first and through in the second, so an English speaker never notices there is a decision to make. Spanish makes you decide roughly every third sentence, because the single English word for has been split down the middle. This lesson is that split, laid out side by side.

Why one English word became two

The two prepositions divide the work along a line that is easier to feel than to define. Para points forward: towards a destination, a recipient, a deadline, a goal. Draw it as an arrow with a target at the end. Por points backward or sideways: to the cause behind something, the price paid for it, the ground covered along the way. Draw it as a circle around the thing, or as the road behind you.

That picture will not decide every sentence for you, but it decides most of them, and the lists below fill in the rest.

Para: the arrow pointing forward

The fourth row is the one you will use most. Para plus an infinitive is how Spanish says in order to, and it is compulsory: Fui a la estación para comprar el billete. (I went to the station to buy the ticket.) Leave the para out and the sentence falls apart.

The sixth row deserves a second look, because it has no clean English equivalent. Para ser tan joven, toca muy bien. (For someone so young, she plays very well.) The para sets up a standard and then the sentence beats it.

Por: cause, exchange, and the ground you cover

Two notes on that table. The duration use is real but optional, and speakers in Spain more often say durante tres años or simply Viví en Sevilla tres años with no preposition at all. And por is the preposition of thanks and of asking after people: Gracias por todo. (Thanks for everything.) Pregunta por mí en recepción. (Ask for me at reception.)

So what?: when you are stuck, ask what the phrase answers. If it answers where to, who for, what for or by when, use para. If it answers why, how much, which way, how often or on whose behalf, use por.

The pairs that change meaning

This is the part worth reading twice. Each row holds two sentences that differ by one word.

Look at the second row. Both sentences are perfectly good Spanish and a listener draws a different picture from each: in one you hand over a wrapped book, in the other you queue at the till because your brother could not. Nothing in English marks that difference, which is why it has to be learned rather than translated.

Walking to Santiago, in both prepositions

The Camino de Santiago gives the whole system in one paragraph. Its best known route, the Camino Francés, runs roughly 800 kilometres from Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela, and the cathedral's pilgrim office issues a certificate, the compostela, to anyone who has walked at least the final 100 kilometres, or cycled 200.

Salimos para Santiago el uno de julio. Caminamos por Navarra, por La Rioja y por Castilla. Andábamos por la mañana, cuando no hacía tanto calor, y parábamos en un albergue por quince euros la noche. Lo hice por mi abuela, que quiso hacer el Camino y nunca pudo. Para ser mi primera vez, no lo hice mal: llegué a la catedral en veintiocho días.

(We set off for Santiago on the first of July. We walked through Navarre, La Rioja and Castile. We walked in the morning, when it was not so hot, and we stopped at a hostel for fifteen euros a night. I did it for my grandmother, who wanted to walk the Camino and never could. For a first attempt, I did not do badly: I reached the cathedral in twenty-eight days.)

Count them: one para of destination, four por of route, one por of time of day, one por of price, one por of motive, one para of standard. Every use in this lesson, in six sentences of ordinary narrative.

Fixed expressions, which you simply learn

Both prepositions anchor a set of phrases that no rule predicts. Learn them whole.

• With por: por favor (please), por fin (at last), por supuesto (of course), por eso (that is why), por lo menos (at least), por ejemplo (for example), por si acaso (just in case), por ahora (for now), por cierto (by the way), por desgracia (unfortunately).
• With para: para siempre (forever), para nada (not at all), no es para tanto (it is not that big a deal), para colmo (to top it all off).

The core of it: por carries far more fixed expressions than para, and several of them are among the commonest phrases in the language. If you are guessing at a set phrase, por is the better bet.

Common misconceptions

• Para is for and por is by. Tidy, and wrong. Por covers because of, in exchange for, along, per and on behalf of, and English uses for in most of those.
• Por is for the past and para for the future. Neither has anything to do with tense. Salgo para Cádiz and Salí para Cádiz are both fine.
• Gracias para is the polite form. It is always gracias por. Thanking names a cause, and causes take por.
• In order to can be dropped, as in English. English lets you say I went to buy bread. Spanish needs the para: Fui a comprar pan is fine as a plain purpose after ir, but Estudio para aprobar cannot lose its para.
• Trabajo por una empresa means I work for a company. It means you are standing in for a company, or working in its place. The employer is para.

The short version

Para looks forward: where you are going, who something is for, when it is due, what it is for, whose payroll you are on, and what standard you are being measured against. Por looks at everything surrounding the action: why it happened, what it cost, which way you went, how you sent it, how often it happens, and whose place you took. Five minimal pairs separate them cleanly, the para plus infinitive construction for in order to is the one you will use most, and a long list of fixed phrases, most of them built on por, sits outside the rules and has to be memorised.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Por vs. para. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Camino de Santiago. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2005). Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, entradas por y para. Santillana.
4. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2013). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), the chapter on prepositions. Routledge.

A phone rings in a flat in Santiago at twenty to midnight. Somebody in the kitchen says:

¿Quién será a estas horas?

Word for word that is who will it be at this hour, which makes no sense, because the phone is ringing now. The sentence means who on earth can that be at this hour? Spanish has a use for the future tense that English has no equivalent for, and half of this lesson is about it. The other half is the machinery: two tenses that look complicated, share every irregular form they have, and can be learned together in about twenty minutes.

The future: endings glued onto the whole infinitive

Every tense so far has chopped the infinitive up before adding endings. The future does not. It keeps the infinitive whole and hangs the endings off the end of it, which is why one set of endings covers all three conjugations.

Every form except nosotros carries a written accent, and that accent is doing real work: hablo is I speak, habló with the accent on the last syllable is he spoke, and hablaré is I will speak. Drop the accent in writing and you have changed the tense.

Twelve irregular stems, in three tidy groups

Twelve verbs shorten the infinitive before the endings arrive. The endings themselves never change.

(I will not be able to go. We will leave at eight. What will you do on Saturday?) Learn the three groups rather than twelve separate words, and notice that the second group inserts a d where the infinitive had an e or an i: tener loses its e and gains a d, giving tendr-.

The conditional: the same stems, different endings

Now the bargain. The conditional uses exactly the same stems, regular and irregular alike, and adds the endings -ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos, -íais, -ían. If you know the future, the conditional costs you one set of endings and nothing else.

Those endings will look familiar: they are the imperfect endings of -er and -ir verbs, the ones from comía and vivía. The difference is what they are attached to. The imperfect strips the infinitive down to com- and viv-; the conditional keeps the whole thing, so comía is I used to eat and comería is I would eat. One letter, two tenses.

What matters here: learn the twelve stems once and you own two tenses. There is no separate list of conditional irregulars, and there never will be.

What each one is for

The future does what you expect: predictions and promises. El año que viene estudiaré Física. (Next year I will study Physics.) Te lo devolveré el lunes. (I will give it back to you on Monday.) But be honest about how often it is used. For anything close and concrete, spoken Spanish across the whole Spanish-speaking world prefers ir a plus infinitive: Voy a llamarte esta tarde is far more common than Te llamaré esta tarde. Keep the simple future for the more distant, the more formal and the more solemn.

The conditional has three jobs. It expresses a hypothesis: Yo en tu lugar, hablaría con el tutor. (If I were you, I would talk to the tutor.) It softens a request into politeness: ¿Podría repetirlo, por favor? (Could you repeat that, please?) Me gustaría solicitar la beca. (I would like to apply for the grant.) And it reports a future seen from the past: Dijo que vendría el jueves. (He said he would come on Thursday.)

Guessing out loud, which English cannot do

Back to the phone ringing at twenty to midnight. Spanish uses the future tense to guess about the present, and the conditional to guess about the past. There is no English equivalent, so the translations all reach for must, probably, I wonder or can that be.

Context tells a listener which reading is meant, and it is almost never ambiguous. Marta estará en casa mañana with a time word is a prediction. Marta estará en casa, said while staring at an unanswered phone, is a guess.

One plan, run twice

Nerea is seventeen, in her last year of bachillerato in Antofagasta, and wants to work at ALMA, the array of 66 radio antennas built at 5,000 metres on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert, which began observing in 2011. Here is her plan, in the future.

Después del bachillerato estudiaré Ingeniería Eléctrica en Antofagasta. Haré prácticas en un laboratorio el segundo año. Tendré que aprender inglés técnico, porque casi toda la documentación está en inglés. Saldré de casa a los diecinueve y me iré a vivir cerca de la universidad. Dentro de siete años trabajaré en el observatorio.

(After bachillerato I will study Electrical Engineering in Antofagasta. I will do a work placement in a laboratory in the second year. I will have to learn technical English, because almost all the documentation is in English. I will leave home at nineteen and go and live near the university. In seven years I will be working at the observatory.)

Now change one input. The grant does not come through, and the whole plan moves into the conditional, where it stops being a prediction and becomes a picture of a life she is not going to have.

Sin la beca no podría estudiar en Antofagasta. Tendría que trabajar y estudiar a la vez. Haría la carrera en siete años en vez de cinco. No saldría de casa hasta los veintitrés. Me gustaría intentarlo igual, pero sería mucho más difícil.

(Without the grant I would not be able to study in Antofagasta. I would have to work and study at the same time. I would take seven years over the degree instead of five. I would not leave home until I was twenty-three. I would like to try anyway, but it would be much harder.)

The verbs are the same verbs. Only the endings moved, and with them the whole status of the plan: from what is going to happen to what would happen under a condition that has not been met.

Key idea: the future asserts, the conditional supposes. That is why the conditional is also the polite tense: supposing is less pushy than asserting, in Spanish as in English.

Common misconceptions

• The future is the normal way to talk about tomorrow. In speech it usually is not. Voy a estudiar esta noche beats Estudiaré esta noche almost everywhere.
• Iré is built from a stem like ir-. Ir is regular in the future: the infinitive stays whole, giving iré, irás, irá. The irregulars are only the twelve listed above.
• Comería is the imperfect of comer. The imperfect is comía. Comería is the conditional, built on the full infinitive, and the extra r is the only visible difference.
• Será las diez is a way of saying it is ten. The guess still agrees with its subject, so it is Serán las diez, plural, exactly as in Son las diez.
• Would is always the conditional. When would means used to, Spanish uses the imperfect: When I was small I would go to my grandmother's is Cuando era pequeña iba a casa de mi abuela.

What you now know

The future and the conditional are the only Spanish tenses built on the complete infinitive, which is why they share one set of stems and why the twelve irregulars, in three groups, cost you a single memorisation for both. The future takes -é, -ás, -á, -emos, -éis, -án and the conditional takes the -ía endings you already knew from the imperfect. In everyday speech ir a plus infinitive carries most of the near future, leaving the simple future for predictions and promises. The conditional supposes, softens a request and reports a future seen from the past. And both tenses do a job English has no form for: the future guesses about the present, the conditional guesses about the past, which is how a Spanish speaker wonders aloud who is ringing at midnight.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Spanish conditional forms and uses. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Future tense. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish conjugation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, el futuro simple y el condicional simple, incluidos sus usos de conjetura. Espasa.

A student who has finished Module 1 of this course writes, about a year abroad in Spain:

Nunca comí paella.

In Mexico City that sentence is completely normal and means I have never eaten paella. In Madrid it will make somebody look up, because it sounds like a specific occasion on which the eating of paella failed to happen. What a speaker in Spain would say is Nunca he comido paella. Same meaning, different tense, and the border between them is geographical rather than grammatical. This lesson builds that tense and then draws the border honestly.

Two words, and the first one is not a real verb any more

The present perfect is haber in the present, plus a past participle. Haber here is not the haber of hay, there is. It carries no meaning of its own; it is a helper whose only job is to hold the person and the tense.

The participle is easy: -ar verbs take -ado, and -er and -ir verbs take -ido. Hablar gives hablado, comer gives comido, vivir gives vivido. Two small spelling notes: when the stem ends in a strong vowel the i of -ido takes an accent, so leer gives leído, oír gives oído and traer gives traído.

Eleven participles that refuse

A short list of very common verbs have participles of their own. There are no rules here; learn the list.

Compound verbs inherit their parent's participle, so descubrir gives descubierto, devolver gives devuelto, deshacer gives deshecho and describir gives descrito. Learn eleven and you get thirty.

Two words that never come apart

English cheerfully splits its perfect: I have never seen it, I have not seen it. Spanish does not. Nothing at all may stand between haber and the participle.

• Negatives go in front of haber: No he visto esa película. (I have not seen that film.)
• Pronouns go in front of haber too: Me he levantado tarde. (I have got up late.) No lo he visto hoy. (I have not seen him today.) Se lo he dado ya. (I have already given it to him.)
• Adverbs that English drops into the middle move out: Nunca he estado en Chile. (I have never been to Chile.) Ya he terminado. (I have already finished.)

And the participle, in this tense, is frozen. It never agrees with anything: Ella ha comido, not comida; Las chicas han llegado, not llegadas. The participle only agrees when it is doing an adjective's job, as in la puerta está abierta (the door is open).

Remember: if you find yourself wanting to put a word between he and the participle, the word belongs in front of he.

What it is for

Two jobs, and the time expressions give each of them away.

The second job is the one worth thinking about. Esta mañana he desayunado a las siete works because this morning is still going on. Say it at nine at night and a Spaniard will switch to the preterite, esta mañana desayuné a las siete, because the morning is over. The tense is tracking whether the container of time has closed, not how long ago the event was.

Where Spain and Latin America part company

Now the honest part. The account above describes central and northern Spain. In most of Latin America, and especially in Mexico, Argentina and much of the Andes, the preterite does far more of that work: Hoy fui al médico and ¿Alguna vez estuviste en Chile? are the ordinary forms, and the present perfect is reserved for situations that genuinely continue into the present, such as He vivido aquí toda mi vida.

Neither is more correct than the other, and the Real Academia describes both as standard. What matters for you is receptive: recognise both, and copy whichever variety you are learning from. Nobody anywhere will misunderstand you.

The point: the forms are identical across the Spanish-speaking world. Only the dividing line between perfect and preterite moves.

At the centro de salud

The present perfect is the tense of the doctor's first three questions, because a consultation is exactly a report on unfinished time. In Spain the first stop for anything non-urgent is a centro de salud, the local primary care centre; you book a cita with your own médico de familia and show a tarjeta sanitaria, the card issued by your region's health service.

Buenos días. ¿Qué le pasa? ¿Ha tenido fiebre? ¿Se ha tomado algo? ¿Ha dormido bien esta semana? (Good morning. What is wrong? Have you had a fever? Have you taken anything? Have you slept well this week?)

Me duele mucho la garganta desde el lunes. He tomado paracetamol dos veces y no me ha hecho nada. No he podido dormir. (My throat has been very sore since Monday. I have taken paracetamol twice and it has done nothing. I have not been able to sleep.)

The vocabulary to carry away: la garganta (throat), la espalda (back), el estómago (stomach), la fiebre (fever), la tos (cough), el resfriado (a cold), la gripe (flu), la cita (appointment), la receta (prescription), la pastilla (tablet), el jarabe (syrup), la farmacia (chemist). And the verb that governs all of it, doler, works like gustar: me duele la cabeza, my head hurts, with the body part as the subject.

Acabar de, the other way to say just

Spanish has no have just. It uses acabar de plus infinitive, in the present tense, and it is extremely common.

• Acabo de llegar. (I have just arrived.)
• Acaban de llamar del centro de salud. (They have just called from the health centre.)
• Acabamos de terminar el examen. (We have just finished the exam.)

Note that the Spanish verb sits in the present even though the English is a perfect. Acabé de llegar is not how you say I had just arrived.

Common misconceptions

• He is the yo form of a verb meaning to have. Possession is tener. He hablado is I have spoken; Tengo un libro is I have a book. The two never swap.
• The participle agrees with the subject. Not after haber. Ellas han llegado, never llegadas. Agreement returns only when the participle works as an adjective.
• No he lo visto is the negative. Nothing may sit between haber and the participle, so it is No lo he visto.
• The present perfect always translates the English present perfect. Across most of Latin America the preterite covers much of that ground: Hoy fui al médico.
• Escribido and volvido are participles. They are the two most common invented forms in learner writing. The real ones are escrito and vuelto.

The takeaway

The present perfect is haber in the present plus a participle in -ado or -ido, with eleven irregular participles and their compounds to learn by heart. The two words cannot be separated, so negatives, pronouns and adverbs all move in front of haber, and the participle never agrees with anything while it is doing this job. The tense reports experience over a lifetime, signalled by nunca, ya, todavía no and alguna vez, and events inside a stretch of time that has not yet closed, signalled by hoy, esta semana and este año. That second use is much stronger in Spain than in most of Latin America, where the preterite takes over, and both are standard. For the English have just, Spanish reaches instead for acabar de plus an infinitive, in the present tense.

Sources

1. SpanishDict. (n.d.). The Spanish present perfect indicative. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Irregular Spanish past participles. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (s. f.). Pretérito perfecto compuesto. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Healthcare in Spain. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española: Morfología y sintaxis I, el pretérito perfecto compuesto y su distribución geográfica. Espasa.

In 1922, in Peñaflor, a town west of Santiago, a carpenter named Tránsito González told a story to a man who wrote it down. The man was Ramón A. Laval, a librarian and founder of the Chilean Folklore Society, and he published it the following year in Cuentos populares en Chile. The story is two pages long, has three characters, and uses almost every tense this course has taught. It is your model.

Las tres mentiras

Un campesino, al morir, dejó por toda herencia a los tres hijos que tenía la cantidad de trescientos pesos. Los dos mayores, que eran muy ambiciosos, querían adueñarse de toda la cantidad; y a fin de que uno solo se quedara con ella, propusieron al menor dejar enterrada la plata y salir a rodar tierras por un año, y entregarla al que, al volver, contara la mentira más grande. Aceptó la proposición el menor, y salieron.

Al año justo se juntaron los tres en el mismo punto en que se habían apartado, que era donde habían enterrado el dinero, y después de abrazarse, comenzó el mayor:

Yo, hermanitos, he trabajado durante todo el año de chacarero, y una vez planté una mata de garbanzos que creció tanto, tanto, que llegó hasta el cielo.

Yo estuve trabajando en una hilandería, y torcí en una ocasión un hilo tan largo, tan largo, que mientras yo lo tenía de una punta la otra llegaba al cielo.

Yo no trabajé en nada fijo. Una noche que venía por un camino muy solo, me puse a torcer un cigarrito, y cuando lo fui a encender, me encontré con que no tenía fósforos. Divisé una luz en la Luna y subí hasta ella a encender mi cigarro.

¿Y por dónde subiste? Por el hilo que tú torciste. ¿Y por dónde bajaste? Por el garbanzo que tú plantaste.

Los trescientos pesos le correspondieron al menor, que era el menos ambicioso y que ni siquiera se había preocupado en todo el año de urdir su mentira.

(The original prints each speech after a long dash, which is how Spanish marks dialogue on the page; the dashes are left out here. The 1923 text also spells one word as fuí, with an accent that later Academy spelling rules removed, so modern Spanish writes fui.)

Glossary, not a translation

• la herencia inheritance. el campesino a farmer, a countryman. adueñarse de to get hold of, to take possession of.
• a fin de que so that. enterrar to bury. la plata money, in most of Latin America. rodar tierras to roam the world.
• el chacarero a smallholder, in Chile and Argentina. la mata a plant. los garbanzos chickpeas. crecer to grow.
• la hilandería a spinning mill. torcer to twist, to spin, and also to roll a cigarette. el hilo thread. la punta the end.
• los fósforos matches. divisar to make out, to spot at a distance. urdir to hatch, to plot. ni siquiera not even.
• corresponder a alguien to fall to somebody, to be somebody's by right.

Read it once for the plot, once for the verbs. The plot is simple enough that you can follow it with the glossary alone, which is the whole point: you are now able to read an unadapted Spanish text written a century ago and understand it.

Reading the verbs

Here is the opening paragraph sorted into two columns. This is the skill Module 2 was building towards.

Four preterites and three imperfects in eighty words, and they are doing different jobs. The imperfects hold the camera still: three sons, two of them greedy, all of them wanting the money. The preterites move it: he left, they proposed, he accepted, they set out.

In short: imperfect for the world as it stood, preterite for what happened next. Read your own draft and ask, for each verb, whether it is scenery or event.

Two tenses you have not been taught, and where they live

The tale contains two forms this course has not covered, and it is worth naming both rather than letting them puzzle you.

Se habían apartado and habían enterrado are the pluperfect, and you can already build it: it is exactly last lesson's present perfect with haber moved into the imperfect. He hablado becomes había hablado, I had spoken. It marks a past event that happened before another past event, which is exactly what the sentence needs: they met at the point from which they had earlier separated.

Se quedara and contara are the imperfect subjunctive, the past-tense partner of the mood you met in Module 5. It is next year's work and this course does not teach it. Recognise it by its -ara and -iera endings and move on; the meaning is the one you would expect, so that one of them should end up with the money, and he should hand it over to whichever of them told the biggest lie.

Your turn: the procedure

Write a short tale of your own, between twelve and eighteen sentences, in five steps. Follow them in order; the order is what stops a first draft from collapsing.

1. Set the scene in the imperfect. Two or three sentences with no events in them. Where, when, who, what things were like. Era invierno y hacía mucho frío. Mi abuela vivía sola en un pueblo pequeño.
2. Break the scene with one preterite. A single event that starts the story. Un martes por la mañana, alguien llamó a la puerta.
3. Drive the middle with preterites, dropping in an imperfect whenever you need to say what was going on around the event. Aim for a run of five or six.
4. Put one line of dialogue in. Use a command or a question, both of which you now own: Abre la puerta, dijo mi abuela.
5. Close in one sentence. Folk tales end fast. Look at how Laval's does: three hundred pesos went to the youngest, and a single relative clause explains why.

A marked model answer

Here is a draft written to that recipe by someone at your stage, with six errors in it. Find them before you read on.

Era un sábado y llovió mucho. Mi hermano y yo estabamos en casa. De repente el gato subía al tejado y no podía bajar. Mi hermano decía: Trae la escalera! Yo he traído la escalera del garaje. Subí despacio y lo cogí. Mi madre nos dijo que éramos muy valientes.

The corrections, in order:

1. llovió should be llovía. The rain is scenery, not an event.
2. estabamos should be estábamos. The imperfect of -ar verbs carries a written accent on the a.
3. subía should be subió. De repente announces an event, and events take the preterite.
4. decía should be dijo. He said it once, at that moment.
5. Trae la escalera! should be ¡Trae la escalera! with the opening mark.
6. he traído should be traje. The story is closed past time; the present perfect belongs to time that is still open.

The corrected version reads: Era un sábado y llovía mucho. Mi hermano y yo estábamos en casa. De repente el gato subió al tejado y no podía bajar. Mi hermano dijo: ¡Trae la escalera! Traje la escalera del garaje. Subí despacio y lo cogí. Mi madre nos dijo que éramos muy valientes.

(It was a Saturday and it was raining hard. My brother and I were at home. Suddenly the cat climbed onto the roof and could not get down. My brother said: bring the ladder! I brought the ladder from the garage. I climbed up slowly and picked him up. My mother told us we were very brave.)

Notice that no podía bajar stayed in the imperfect even though it sits between two preterites. Being unable to get down is a state that lasted, not a moment.

Mark your own draft against five questions

1. Does every preterite name something that happened once, at a point you could put on a clock?
2. Does every imperfect describe weather, time, age, appearance, feelings, or a repeated habit?
3. Do your -ar imperfects carry their accent, as in estábamos and jugábamos, and do your preterite yo and él forms carry theirs, as in hablé and habló?
4. Have you opened every question and exclamation with its inverted mark?
5. Does the story end in one sentence, without explaining itself twice?

Bottom line: a narrative that keeps its two past tenses straight reads as fluent Spanish even when the vocabulary is simple. One that mixes them reads as translated English however good the words are.

Common misconceptions

• The preterite is for long ago and the imperfect for recently. Neither is about distance. Both describe the same past; they differ in whether they present it as a point or as a stretch.
• A folk tale needs old-fashioned Spanish. Laval's text is a carpenter's spoken Chilean Spanish, written down almost as it was said. Write your story in the Spanish you actually have.
• Every sentence needs a subject pronoun. Spanish drops them, and the tale drops nearly all of them. Yo appears only where the brothers are being contrasted with one another.
• You should look up every unknown word. You just read a hundred-year-old text with a glossary of twenty items. Reading past a word you half understand is a skill, and it is the one that gets you to a novel.

Pulling it together

A story in Spanish is built from two tenses doing two jobs: the imperfect holds the scene still, the preterite moves it forward, and a single sentence of each is usually enough to start. The Chilean tale you read follows that pattern exactly, and adds a present perfect in the eldest brother's boast, a pluperfect for what had happened before the reunion, comparatives in tan largo que and la mentira más grande, and a por of route in the line that wins the argument, por el hilo que tú torciste. Every one of those is something this course has taught you to see. Draft your own tale in five steps, then mark it against five questions, and keep the ending to one sentence.

Sources

1. Laval, R. A. (1923). Cuentos populares en Chile (Revista de Folklore Chileno, Tomo IX), cuento 37, Las tres mentiras. Imprenta Cervantes. gutenberg.org
2. SpanishDict. (n.d.). Preterite vs. imperfect in Spanish. SpanishDict Grammar Guide. spanishdict.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Chilean Spanish. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2010). Ortografía de la lengua española, sobre la tilde en los monosílabos. Espasa.