Spanish III

El hombre pisó algo blanduzco, y enseguida sintió la mordedura en el pie.

That is the first sentence of A la deriva, a story Horacio Quiroga published in 1912 and collected in 1917. Two verbs, thirteen words, and a man is already dying. Read it again before you look at the English: The man stepped on something soft, and at once he felt the bite in his foot.

You can read that sentence. You could not have read it two years ago. This lesson is a check on what you own, run over a real page rather than over a worksheet, and the check is the lesson: nothing from Spanish II is taught again from the beginning here. It is pointed at, inside a text that was written for adults in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and not for you.

The gloss you are allowed

Quiroga sets his stories in Misiones, the strip of Argentine jungle between Paraguay and Brazil, and he uses the words of that place. Here is the vocabulary you cannot be expected to guess.

Now the passage. Read it once straight through without stopping at anything.

El hombre pisó algo blanduzco, y enseguida sintió la mordedura en el pie. Saltó adelante, y al volverse con un juramento vio una yararacusú que arrollada sobre sí misma, esperaba otro ataque.

El hombre echó una veloz ojeada a su pie, donde dos gotitas de sangre engrosaban dificultosamente, y sacó el machete de la cintura. La víbora vio la amenaza, y hundió más la cabeza en el centro mismo de su espiral; pero el machete cayó de plano, dislocándole las vértebras.

El hombre se bajó hasta la mordedura, quitó las gotitas de sangre, y durante un instante contempló. Un dolor agudo nacía de los dos puntitos violetas, y comenzaba a invadir todo el pie. Apresuradamente se ligó el tobillo con su pañuelo y siguió por la picada hacia su rancho.

In English: The man stepped on something soft, and at once he felt the bite in his foot. He jumped forward, and on turning round with a curse he saw a yararacusú which, coiled on itself, was waiting for another attack. The man threw a quick glance at his foot, where two drops of blood were thickening with difficulty, and pulled the machete from his belt. The viper saw the threat, and sank its head deeper into the very centre of its coil; but the machete fell flat, dislocating its vertebrae. The man bent down to the bite, wiped away the drops of blood, and for an instant looked. A sharp pain was being born from the two little violet dots, and was beginning to invade the whole foot. Hurriedly he bound his ankle with his handkerchief and went on up the trail towards his hut.

Why nine verbs are preterite and four are imperfect

Count them. Pisó, sintió, saltó, vio, echó, sacó, hundió, cayó, se bajó, quitó, contempló, se ligó, siguió. Thirteen preterites, one after another, each one a step in a chain. That is what the preterite is for: it moves the clock.

Four verbs refuse to move it. Esperaba (was waiting), engrosaban (were thickening), nacía (was being born), comenzaba (was beginning). All imperfect, and all of them things that were already going on when the next preterite landed on top of them. The snake was not waiting once; it was in a state of waiting. The blood was not thickening at a moment; it was thickening while he looked.

Try the swap and listen to the damage. La víbora esperó otro ataque would mean the snake waited and then stopped waiting, a completed episode with an end. Quiroga wants the snake still coiled, still ready, while the man reaches for his machete. He needs the imperfect, and he gets suspense out of a verb ending.

Key idea: the preterite and the imperfect are not two ways of saying the same past. They divide the past into what happened and what was going on, and a writer chooses between them the way a director chooses between a cut and a held shot.

Three reflexives and one that is not what it looks like

Se bajó and se ligó are the reflexive pattern you learned with morning routines: he lowered himself, he bound his own ankle. Notice what Spanish does not say. It does not say se ligó su tobillo con su pañuelo, because the reflexive has already told you whose ankle it is. Spanish uses el tobillo, the ankle, and lets the pronoun do the possessing. English cannot manage this and has to write his ankle.

Al volverse is the same verb machinery in a different frame: al plus an infinitive means on doing something, and the reflexive pronoun rides on the end of the infinitive. On turning round.

Now the one that fools people. Dislocándole las vértebras has le in it, and le is an indirect object pronoun, not a reflexive. Who is the le? The snake. Literally: dislocating for it the vertebrae, which is Spanish for dislocating its vertebrae. Spanish marks the owner of a damaged body part with an indirect object, and this shows up everywhere once you notice it: Me duele la cabeza, Le rompieron la pierna, Nos cortaron el pelo.

The shouting, and one imperative

Further down the page the man reaches his hut and calls his wife. Spanish prints dialogue with a long dash at the start of each turn; the page you are reading cannot show that dash, so the turns are given here on their own lines. The Spanish is unchanged.

• ¡Dorotea! ¡Dame caña! (Dorotea! Give me cane spirit!)
• ¡Te pedí caña, no agua! (I asked you for cane spirit, not water!)
• ¡Pero es caña, Paulino! (But it is cane spirit, Paulino!)

Dame is an affirmative tú command with the pronoun attached and an accent added to keep the stress where it was: da plus me gives dame, and a two-pronoun version would give dámela. Te pedí is a preterite with an indirect object: I asked you for it. And the exchange tells you, without a word of explanation, that the poison has already taken his sense of taste. He is drinking cane spirit and calling it water.

This is the first thing a third-year reader can do that a second-year reader cannot. The information is not in the vocabulary. It is in what the characters say to each other and what you are left to work out.

One conditional, doing arithmetic

The man gets into his canoe and paddles out into the Paraná:

Allí la corriente del río, que en las inmediaciones del Iguazú corre seis millas, lo llevaría antes de cinco horas a Tacurú-Pucú.

There the current of the river, which near the Iguazú runs at six miles, would carry him to Tacurú-Pucú in under five hours.

Llevaría is a conditional, and there is no if-clause anywhere near it. It is the future seen from a point in the past: at that moment, the trip still lay ahead of him. English does exactly the same thing with would. And lo is the direct object pronoun for him, sitting where Spanish puts it, in front of the conjugated verb.

What you cannot do yet

Three times in that passage a clause hangs off a noun by a que: una yararacusú que esperaba otro ataque, un vaso lleno, que el hombre sorbió en tres tragos, la corriente del río, que corre seis millas. Those are relative clauses, and you have been reading them for two years without a name for them. In Module 3 they get one, and they get the other five words Spanish can use instead of que.

Here is a harder gap. Every verb in the passage is indicative, because everything in it happens. Suppose the man had thought, before he was bitten: I am looking for a trail that comes out at the river. Spanish would need a mood you have only used after wishes and doubts, because that trail might not exist. Busco una picada que salga al río. That sentence is the next lesson, and it is where Spanish III begins.

The honest statement of where you are: the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines put a reader who can handle a page like this, with a glossary and some rereading, in the Intermediate range. Intermediate means you can create with the language rather than recite it, handle a straightforward exchange, and narrate in the past in connected sentences. It does not mean you follow a radio debate at speed. This course is aimed squarely at the top of that range.

Common misconceptions

• Reading means translating. If you convert every sentence into English before you understand it, you are running a slow machine that stops working the moment someone speaks. The goal is the Spanish going in as Spanish, with the gloss used only for words no reader could guess.
• An unknown word has to be looked up. Quiroga writes blanduzco once and never explains it. You do not need it: the man stepped on something and was bitten. Skipping a word on purpose is a reading skill, not a failure.
• The imperfect means the distant past. It means an unfinished view of any past, near or far. Engrosaban is describing two drops of blood four seconds old.

Where this leaves us

One page of Quiroga carries thirteen preterites moving the story forward, four imperfects holding scenery in place, two reflexives, an indirect object marking whose vertebrae were broken, a shouted command with its pronoun stuck on the end, a conditional doing arithmetic about a journey, and three relative clauses. All of it is Spanish II, and you read it. What the page also carries, and what the rest of this course is about, is the mood Spanish uses for things that are wanted, doubted, imagined or not yet real, and the tenses that let you say what had already happened before something else did. The man is in the canoe, and he is drifting. Whether he reaches Tacurú-Pucú is worth finding out for yourself.

Sources

1. Quiroga, H. (1917). A la deriva. In Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte. Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Horacio Quiroga. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Yepes, E. (n.d.). Chapter 9: Imperfect vs. preterite, ordinal numbers, impersonal hacer. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
4. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (2012). ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012, Reading: Intermediate. ACTFL. (The ACTFL site redirects automated requests to its terms page, so this is cited unlinked.)

Busco un libro que tenga mapas del Camino de Santiago.

Busco el libro que tiene mapas del Camino de Santiago.

Both come out in English as roughly the same sentence: I am looking for a book that has maps of the Camino de Santiago. Two words changed, un for el and tenga for tiene, and the bookseller behind the counter is now going to do two entirely different things.

Hearing the first, she walks you to the travel shelf and starts pulling volumes down to check which ones have maps inside. Hearing the second, she asks you for the title, because you have just told her that one particular book exists and that you know something about it.

Nothing in either sentence expresses a wish, a doubt, an emotion or a judgement. Buscar is not a trigger verb. In Spanish II the subjunctive always sat under a main clause that pushed it there: quiero que vengas, dudo que sea verdad, me alegro de que estés aquí. Here the push comes from inside the noun phrase, and that is the new thing.

What the bookseller actually hears

The clause hanging off the noun by que is an adjective clause, called a cláusula adjetiva or an oración de relativo in Spanish. It does the job an adjective does: it narrows down the noun. Compare un libro rojo (a red book) with un libro que tiene mapas (a book that has maps). Same work, more words.

The noun it describes is the antecedent. Everything in this lesson turns on one question about that antecedent: does the speaker present it as a thing that exists and can be pointed at, or as a specification that something might or might not satisfy?

English cannot do this with a verb ending, so it reaches for other equipment: a book that has maps against any book with maps in it, or the book with the maps. Spanish does it by moving one verb into the subjunctive mood.

The rule, now that you have watched it work

In an adjective clause, use the indicative when the speaker treats the antecedent as existing and identifiable. Use the subjunctive when its existence is unknown, denied, or merely desired.

Notice three things the rule is not about. It is not about the future: Busco un piso que tenga ascensor (I am looking for a flat that has a lift) is happening at this moment. It is not about whether the thing is real in the world: the flat may well exist, and the speaker may find it that afternoon. It is about what the speaker is willing to assert. And it is not triggered by que, which appears in both columns of every pair below.

The point: in a noun clause the main verb decides the mood. In an adjective clause the speaker's knowledge of the antecedent decides it, and the main verb has no vote.

Seven pairs, one change each

Read across each row. The Spanish on the left and the Spanish on the right differ in as little as one letter.

Now run the test in reverse, which is the fastest way to feel the rule. Take Busco una amiga que hable quechua and force the indicative: Busco una amiga que habla quechua. That is not ungrammatical. It means there is a particular Quechua-speaking friend of yours, and you have lost her in the crowd. Spanish speakers will hear exactly that.

Where the personal a goes, and where it stays

Spanish puts a in front of a human direct object. With an unknown, hypothetical person, that a normally disappears, and its absence is a second signal running alongside the mood.

• Busco una secretaria que hable ruso. I am looking for a secretary who speaks Russian. No a: no such person is in view yet.
• Busco a la secretaria que habla ruso. I am looking for the secretary who speaks Russian. The a is back, and so is the indicative, because she works here and you want her now.

Three words keep their a whatever happens, because they are grammatically personal by definition: alguien, nadie, and alguno or ninguno used of people.

• No conozco a nadie que hable persa. I do not know anyone who speaks Persian.
• ¿Conoces a alguien que sepa soldar? Do you know anyone who knows how to weld?
• No hay ninguno que quiera hacerlo. There is not one who is willing to do it.

Nobody, nothing, and hardly anyone

When the antecedent is flatly denied, the clause is always subjunctive, because there is nothing there to describe.

• No hay nada que me guste en esta carta. There is nothing on this menu that I like.
• No veo ningún tren que salga antes de las seis. I do not see any train that leaves before six.

Words that scrape the antecedent down to almost nothing behave the same way: pocos, apenas, casi ninguno.

• Hay pocas ciudades que tengan tres ríos. There are few cities that have three rivers.
• Apenas hay quien lo recuerde. There is hardly anyone who remembers it.

Against that, Hay muchas ciudades que tienen tres ríos (there are many cities that have three rivers) goes back to the indicative, because many cities is an assertion that they are out there.

Lo que, when no noun comes first

Drop the noun and Spanish uses lo que, which means the thing that, or simply what. The same test decides the mood.

• Haz lo que dice el manual. Do what the manual says. The manual says something definite.
• Haz lo que quieras. Do whatever you like. Nothing has been specified.
• Compré lo que necesitaba. I bought what I needed. A known list.
• Compra lo que necesites. Buy whatever you need. An open list.

Once you hear it, the English translations sort themselves out: what for the indicative, whatever for the subjunctive.

Digan lo que digan

Spanish has a fixed pattern that doubles the subjunctive to mean it does not matter which. The verb appears twice, with a relative word in between.

• Digan lo que digan, el examen es el martes. Whatever they say, the exam is on Tuesday.
• Pase lo que pase, te llamo a las ocho. Whatever happens, I will call you at eight.
• Sea como sea, hay que terminarlo hoy. One way or another, it has to be finished today.
• Vayas donde vayas, lleva el pasaporte. Wherever you go, take your passport.

These are worth memorising whole. They come up constantly in speech and they are the sort of phrase that makes a learner sound like a reader.

If the forms have gone rusty

The present subjunctive is built from the yo form of the present indicative: strip the final o, then add the endings of the other conjugation. An -ar verb takes e endings, an -er or -ir verb takes a endings.

Six verbs have no usable yo form and simply have to be known: dar gives dé, estar gives esté, haber gives haya, ir gives vaya, saber gives sepa, ser gives sea. Note the written accent on dé, which keeps it apart from the preposition de.

Worth holding on to: the two -ir verbs in that table change their stem again in the nosotros and vosotros forms, durmamos and pidamos, which is the one place the pattern will catch you out.

Common misconceptions

• The subjunctive here marks the future. It does not. Busco un piso que tenga ascensor is about this afternoon. What is uncertain is the flat, not the time.
• Un means subjunctive and el means indicative. The articles correlate with the rule, but they do not make it. Tengo un amigo que vive en Lima (I have a friend who lives in Lima) has un and the indicative, because the friend exists.
• The subjunctive says the thing is not real. It says the speaker is not asserting it. The flat with the lift may be two streets away. The speaker simply has not found it and will not vouch for it.

Putting it together

A clause that hangs off a noun by que describes that noun, and Spanish makes you declare, in the verb ending, whether you are pointing at something or specifying something. Point at it and you get the indicative: el libro que tiene mapas. Specify it and you get the subjunctive: un libro que tenga mapas. Deny it outright, with nadie, nada or ningún, and the subjunctive is the only option, because a thing that does not exist cannot be described in the indicative. The personal a drops out along with the certainty, except in front of alguien, nadie and ninguno, which keep it. In short: the mood of an adjective clause is a report on what the speaker knows, not on what is true.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 55. El subjuntivo en cláusulas adjetivas / The subjunctive in adjective clauses. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Modo subjuntivo, section Valor de operación del modo subjuntivo vs. indicativo. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the chapters on oraciones de relativo and on the alternation of mood in subordinate clauses. Espasa. (The RAE sites refuse automated requests, so this is cited unlinked.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 16, The subjunctive. Hodder Education.

Two text messages, sent from the same station platform, one letter apart.

Te llamo cuando llego. I will call you when I arrive.

Te llamo cuando llegue. I will call you when I arrive.

English has one sentence for both. Spanish has two, and the difference is not decoration. The first one, with the indicative llego, describes a habit: every time I come to this city, I call you on arrival. The second, with the subjunctive llegue, is about today: the train has not got there yet, and the call is waiting on an arrival that has not happened.

An adverbial clause hangs off the main verb rather than off a noun, and answers when, why, how or on what condition. Lesson 2 put the mood decision inside the noun phrase. This one puts it inside the clock.

The three groups, side by side

Spanish connectors sort into three boxes, and once a connector is in the right box you never have to think about it again.

Group one: the clock decides

Take en cuanto, which means as soon as. Look at the same connector in three different times.

• En cuanto sonó la alarma, salimos a la calle. As soon as the alarm went off, we went out into the street. It happened. Preterite, indicative.
• En cuanto suena la alarma, salimos a la calle. As soon as the alarm goes off, we go out into the street. That is what we always do in this building. Present, indicative.
• En cuanto suene la alarma, saldremos a la calle. As soon as the alarm goes off, we will go out into the street. It has not gone off. Present subjunctive.

Read the three aloud and notice that the English as soon as never changes. All the work in Spanish is being done by one vowel: sonó, suena, suene.

The same three-way test runs on every connector in the first group.

Why this matters: the test is not the tense of the main verb. It is whether the event in the adverbial clause has occurred from the speaker's standpoint. A past main verb with an unrealised event still takes the subjunctive, which is where Module 2 will pick the thread up: No quería esperar hasta que terminaras (I did not want to wait until you finished) needs the imperfect subjunctive, because at that moment you had not finished.

Group two: six connectors that never negotiate

These six always take the subjunctive, whatever the tense, whatever has happened. There is no swing to learn, because each of them already contains an idea the speaker cannot assert: a purpose, an event that has not arrived, an absence, a condition.

Spanish teachers pass around the mnemonic ESCAPA, built from the first letters of En caso de que, Sin que, Con tal de que, Antes de que, Para que and A menos que. It is a crutch, not a rule, but it is a crutch that works.

Notice the second row. Salimos antes de que cerraran el puente is about a past event that really did take place, and it is still subjunctive. Antes de que never lets go, because at the moment of the main verb the closing had not happened yet.

Notice the third row too, because English does something Spanish cannot copy. English says he left without our seeing him, using a possessive and a gerund. Spanish must build a full clause with a conjugated verb: sin que lo viéramos. The word-for-word attempt, sin vernos lo, is not Spanish.

When the subject does not change, drop the que

Four of the connectors have a shorter twin used with an infinitive. If the same person does both actions, Spanish prefers the infinitive and there is no subjunctive at all.

Read down the right column and check the subjects: in every case one person is doing both things. That is the whole condition.

Aunque, and what a speaker is willing to admit

Aunque means although, even though, or even if, and Spanish chooses which of those three you meant by choosing the mood.

• Vamos a pescar aunque hace frío. We are going fishing even though it is cold. The speaker has felt the cold. It is a fact on the table.
• Vamos a pescar aunque haga frío. We are going fishing even if it is cold. The cold is a possibility, and the speaker is refusing to let it count.

There is a third use worth having. The subjunctive after aunque can also concede a fact that both speakers already know, precisely in order to brush it aside.

Aunque sea tu hermano, no puede entrar sin entrada. Even if he is your brother, he cannot come in without a ticket. Everyone agrees he is the brother. The subjunctive says: granted, and it changes nothing.

The same two faces belong to a pesar de que (in spite of the fact that), and the related connectors como (how, in the way that), según (according to) and donde (where) work by the same logic: indicative for a way or a place that is known, subjunctive for one still open. Hazlo como quieras is do it however you like; Hazlo como dice el manual is do it the way the manual says.

A small spelling trap

Cuando, como and donde carry no written accent as connectors. The accented cuándo, cómo and dónde belong to questions, direct or indirect. Cuando llegues, avísame (when you arrive, let me know) against No sé cuándo llegas (I do not know when you are arriving). The accent is the difference between telling and asking, and a missing one is the commonest written error at this level.

Common misconceptions

• Cuando always takes the subjunctive. It takes the subjunctive only for an event that has not happened. Cuando era pequeño vivíamos en Cádiz is indicative and always will be.
• If the main verb is future, the clause is subjunctive. Close, but it fails on habits and on aunque. Siempre que viene trae pan has a present main verb and an indicative clause; Iré aunque hace frío keeps the indicative because the cold is a fact.
• Antes de que sometimes takes the indicative. It does not. Even about a finished past event, Spanish writes antes de que cerraran, never antes de que cerraron.

The short version

Three boxes, and a connector lives in exactly one of them. The time connectors, headed by cuando and en cuanto, swing on a single question: has it happened, or is it still waiting? The ESCAPA six never swing, because purpose, anticipation, absence and condition are things a speaker cannot assert. Aunque swings on a different question: is the obstacle a fact you are admitting, or a possibility you are dismissing? And when one person is doing both actions, the cleanest Spanish drops the que altogether and uses an infinitive. Bottom line: the mood after a connector reports the status of the event, and Spanish makes you state that status in every sentence you write.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 58. El subjuntivo en cláusulas adverbiales / The subjunctive in adverb clauses. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish verbs, section on the subjunctive and its uses. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the chapters on subordinadas temporales, finales and concesivas. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 16 on the subjunctive and chapter 33 on conjunctions of time. Hodder Education.

Near the end of A la deriva, the story you read in Lesson 1, Quiroga writes this:

El sol había caído ya cuando el hombre, semitendido en el fondo de la canoa, tuvo un violento escalofrío.

The sun had already gone down when the man, half stretched out in the bottom of the canoe, had a violent shiver.

Two past events in one sentence, and they are not level with each other. The shiver is the moment the story is standing on: tuvo, preterite. The sunset is further back, already finished before the shiver arrived: había caído. Spanish has a tense whose only job is to say that, and it is the tense this lesson builds.

It is called the pluperfect, or in Spanish the pluscuamperfecto. English has exactly the same tense, had plus a past participle, which makes this one of the few pieces of Spanish grammar you can carry across almost unchanged.

Step one: the two halves

Every compound tense in Spanish is the verb haber plus a past participle. You already built one in Spanish II: the present perfect, he comido, I have eaten. Change haber from the present to the imperfect and you have the pluscuamperfecto.

The vosotros row is used in Spain and almost nowhere else. A speaker in Lima, Bogotá or Guadalajara says ustedes habían comido to a group of friends, and the habíais form will be something they read rather than say. Both are correct Spanish; they just belong to different rooms.

Notice that había serves both yo and él. Context sorts it out, and where it cannot, Spanish puts the pronoun back in: yo había salido, pero ella no (I had left, but she had not).

Step two: the participle, and the twelve that misbehave

The past participle is regular for the great majority of verbs: an -ar verb takes -ado, an -er or -ir verb takes -ido. Hablar gives hablado, comer gives comido, vivir gives vivido.

About a dozen are irregular, and they are the ones you meet constantly, so they have to be learned as a block.

Compounds inherit the irregularity: componer gives compuesto, devolver gives devuelto, describir gives descrito, deshacer gives deshecho.

A few verbs put an accent on the i so that the vowels stay apart: leído, creído, traído, oído, caído. That accent is not optional, and its absence is one of the easiest errors for a reader to spot in your writing. Quiroga's sentence has one of them: había caído.

Step three: assembling one, from a timeline

Here is the procedure end to end. Take a real ordering problem and write it out.

The facts: at 19:40 the train left. At 19:45 you reached the platform. You want to say so in one Spanish sentence, with the platform as the moment the story stands on.

1. Decide which event is the reference point. You arriving. That one goes in the preterite: llegué.
2. Decide which event is earlier. The train leaving. That one goes in the pluscuamperfecto.
3. Take haber in the imperfect for the train, third person singular: había.
4. Take the participle of salir. It is regular: salido.
5. Join them, and put ya in front of the pair to make the ordering audible: Cuando llegué al andén, el tren ya había salido. When I got to the platform, the train had already left.

Where does ya go? Directly before había, or between había and salido: ya había salido and había salido ya are both normal, and Quiroga chose the second. What ya cannot do is separate the two halves of a compound tense in a way that breaks them up with anything heavier than an adverb of this kind.

Step four: change one input and watch the meaning flip

Now the same scene with one change. Keep everything else and put the second verb in the preterite instead.

• Cuando llegué al andén, el tren ya había salido. When I got to the platform, the train had already left. I missed it.
• Cuando llegué al andén, el tren salió. When I got to the platform, the train left. It pulled out as I arrived, possibly with me on it, possibly in front of my face.

One tense, two mornings. Try the flip on a classroom instead:

• Cuando el profesor entró, los alumnos guardaron los móviles. When the teacher came in, the students put their phones away. They were caught, and they reacted.
• Cuando el profesor entró, los alumnos ya habían guardado los móviles. When the teacher came in, the students had already put their phones away. Someone warned them.

Remember: the pluscuamperfecto does not say an event was long ago. It says the event was finished before another past moment. Five seconds is enough.

Nothing gets between haber and the participle

The two halves are welded. No word may sit between them except the light adverbs already mentioned, and the two things learners most want to insert must go somewhere else.

• The negative goes in front of haber: no había sentido gusto alguno, he had not tasted anything. That line is Quiroga's, from the moment the man drinks the cane spirit and tastes water.
• Object and reflexive pronouns also go in front of haber: lo había conocido en Puerto Esperanza, he had met him at Puerto Esperanza. Again Quiroga's, and the lo comes before había, not before conocido.
• Both at once, in that order: no lo había visto nunca, I had never seen him.

One more rule that saves marks. After haber, the participle never agrees with anything. It ends in -o and stays there: Las cartas habían llegado, the letters had arrived, not habían llegadas. The participle only agrees when it is working as an adjective: Las cartas estaban abiertas, the letters were open.

The words that travel with this tense

There is one further form you will meet in the older texts this course reads, and it is worth recognising rather than using: the pretérito anterior, hubo salido. It means the same as había salido, appears after connectors such as apenas or en cuanto, and was already retreating from ordinary speech by the nineteenth century. When Cervantes or the author of Lazarillo uses it, read it as a plain pluperfect and move on.

Common misconceptions

• The pluscuamperfecto is for the distant past. It is purely relative. In Cuando llegué, el tren ya había salido, the departure is about five minutes old.
• Habían can mean there were. In careful Spanish, existential haber has no plural in any tense: había tres coches, there were three cars, never habían tres coches. You will hear the plural in several regions and see it corrected in every style guide.
• The participle agrees, like an adjective. Not after haber. Las cartas habían llegado, never llegadas. Agreement returns only with ser and estar.

What to carry forward

Había plus a participle is a hinge between two past moments: it pins one event behind another and leaves the preterite to carry the story. Build it in four moves. Pick the reference moment, pick the earlier event, put haber in the imperfect, attach the participle, and check the participle against the dozen irregulars and the accented ones such as leído and caído. Keep the two halves welded, with the negative and any pronouns in front of haber, and keep the participle ending in -o. The upshot: Quiroga did not choose había caído for elegance. He needed the sun already down before the shiver started, and no other tense in Spanish says so.

Sources

1. Quiroga, H. (1917). A la deriva. In Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
2. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 62. Los tiempos compuestos: el pluscuamperfecto. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2005). Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, entry haber, on the invariable singular of existential haber. Santillana. (The RAE sites refuse automated requests, so this is cited unlinked.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 14 on the compound tenses. Hodder Education.

Here is a sentence written by a real third-year student, about a real argument at a kitchen table:

Mi madre quería que yo estudio medicina.

Every word in it is a Spanish word, the vocabulary is right, and a Spanish speaker will understand it. It is also wrong, and wrong in a way worth taking apart slowly, because the repair is the whole content of this lesson.

Where the sentence breaks

Start with what the student got right. Querer que takes the subjunctive: you learned that in Spanish II, and Mi madre quiere que yo estudie medicina (my mother wants me to study medicine) is a correct sentence. So the student knew the trigger and knew the mood.

Now look at the main verb. It is quería, imperfect. The wanting is in the past. But estudio is a present indicative, which makes the sentence say something like: my mother used to want, and I study, and the two clauses have come apart. Spanish will not have it.

Correcting estudio to estudie does not fix it either. Mi madre quería que yo estudie medicina puts a past wish over a present subjunctive, and a Spanish ear hears a clash: the wanting is over, so the studying cannot still be hanging in the present. What the sentence needs is a past subjunctive, and Spanish has one.

Mi madre quería que yo estudiara medicina. My mother wanted me to study medicine.

The recipe, and why it never fails

The imperfect subjunctive is the easiest tense in Spanish to build, because it is made from a form you already know and there are no exceptions at all. Not one verb in the language escapes it.

1. Take the third-person plural of the preterite. The ellos form. For estudiar that is estudiaron.
2. Remove the final -ron. That leaves estudia-.
3. Add the endings: -ra, -ras, -ra, -ramos, -rais, -ran.

Now watch it work on the verbs that fight you everywhere else.

Ser and ir share one form, exactly as they share one preterite. Si yo fuera tú is if I were you; Me pidió que fuera al médico is he asked me to go to the doctor. Context decides, and it always does.

So what?: if you can say the ellos preterite, you can build this tense. If you cannot, the problem is your preterite, not the subjunctive, and that is where to go back to.

Two learner errors this recipe kills

First error: building from the infinitive. A student who writes que yo pediera has taken pedir, chopped the -ir and bolted on an ending. The preterite of pedir is pidieron, with an i in the stem, so the subjunctive is pidiera. The same catches durmiera from durmieron, sintiera from sintieron, and prefiriera from prefirieron. Every -ir verb with a stem change in the preterite carries that change through the whole imperfect subjunctive, all six persons.

Second error: the missing accent. The nosotros form is always stressed on the third-from-last syllable, which in Spanish always means a written accent: habláramos, comiéramos, fuéramos, pidiéramos. Write hablaramos and you have written a word that does not exist. This is the single most common spelling slip in third-year work, and it is visible from across the room.

The other set of endings

Spanish has a second imperfect subjunctive, built from the same stem with -se endings: hablase, hablases, hablase, hablásemos, hablaseis, hablasen. It means exactly the same thing. There is no difference of tense, mood or politeness.

What differs is where you meet it. The -ra set dominates modern Spanish everywhere. The Wikipedia article on Spanish conjugation, citing Mark Davies's Corpus del Español, puts the ratio of -ra to -se at roughly seven to one across twentieth-century Spanish, and reports the -se forms as virtually obsolete in the Americas. In Spain they survive in careful writing, in legal and administrative prose, and in older literature.

So: build with -ra, and recognise -se when you read it. Si yo tuviese dinero and Si yo tuviera dinero are the same sentence.

One reading warning belongs here. Spanish journalism and literary prose sometimes use the -ra form where you would expect a pluperfect indicative: el poeta que naciera en Metapa en 1867 means the poet who had been born in Metapa in 1867, not who might be born. It is a written flourish, it is the oldest use of the form, and you should read it rather than copy it.

Where the tense is used

Everything that sent a verb into the present subjunctive sends it into the imperfect subjunctive when the main clause moves into the past. The triggers do not change; the tense does.

Read the right-hand column and notice that not one trigger is new. Lessons 2 and 3 taught the triggers; this lesson only teaches the past forms they take.

Ojalá, and a wish that has already lost

Ojalá comes from an Arabic phrase meaning if God should will, and it is one of the visible marks that Spanish spent eight centuries beside Andalusi Arabic. With the present subjunctive it means a hope that is still live. With the imperfect subjunctive it means a wish the speaker knows is not going to be granted.

• Ojalá venga mañana. I hope she comes tomorrow. She might.
• Ojalá viniera mañana. I wish she would come tomorrow. She will not.
• Ojalá tuviera veinte años más de práctica. I wish I had twenty more years of practice. I do not.

The politeness forms

Three verbs use the imperfect subjunctive to soften a request, and this is the everyday use you will hear most often in a shop or an office: quisiera, pudiera, debiera.

• Quisiera hablar con el director. I would like to speak to the director. Compare quiero hablar con el director, which is blunt but not rude.
• ¿Pudiera usted repetirlo? Could you repeat that? The conditional podría does the same job and is more common.
• Debiera haberlo dicho antes. I ought to have said so earlier.

Common misconceptions

• The imperfect subjunctive has irregular verbs. It has none. Every irregularity you see in it was already there in the ellos preterite, and was simply inherited.
• The -se forms are more formal or more polite. They are not. They are regional and a little literary, and they carry no extra courtesy. The politeness lives in quisiera, not in quisiese.
• Quería que and quiero que behave the same. They do not. Quiero que vengas and quería que vinieras are both right; quería que vengas is a mismatch, and the sequence of tenses in Lesson 7 is where that rule is set out in full.

What you now know

Go back to the broken sentence. Mi madre quería que yo estudio medicina failed at a single joint: a past main verb reaching forward into the present. Repair it by taking estudiaron, dropping the -ron, and adding -ra, which gives estudiara, and the sentence holds. That recipe covers the entire language, including fuera, tuviera, dijera, hubiera and pidiera, because every irregularity lives in the preterite and is inherited whole. Watch the accent on the nosotros form, read -se as a regional twin of -ra, and remember the two everyday uses that have nothing to do with subordination: ojalá for a wish that has already lost, and quisiera for a request you want to land softly. The core of it: the triggers were learned last year. What is new is the tense they take once the main clause moves into the past.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 56. El imperfecto del subjuntivo / The past subjunctive. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish conjugation, notes on the relative frequency of the -ra and -se imperfect subjunctives, citing M. Davies, Corpus del Español. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the chapter on the forms and uses of the pretérito imperfecto de subjuntivo. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 16 on the subjunctive, including the -ra and -se forms. Hodder Education.

One English sentence: If I had more time, I would learn Portuguese. Four Spanish attempts, taken from a single class of sixteen-year-olds. Three are wrong.

1. Si yo tendría más tiempo, aprendería portugués.
2. Si yo tenga más tiempo, aprendería portugués.
3. Si yo tuviera más tiempo, aprendería portugués.
4. Si yo tuviera más tiempo, aprenderé portugués.

Number three is the sentence. The other three break rules that are worth knowing by name, because each one comes from a reasonable guess about how Spanish ought to work.

The two forms si will not accept

Attempt one puts a conditional straight after si. English does exactly this in its own way, and English speakers reach for it: if I would have more time. The Spanish rule is flat. Si never takes the conditional. Not tendría, not sería, not haría. The Spanish Grammar Manual states the same boundary from the other side: the si clause can sit in several indicative tenses or in the imperfect subjunctive, and in nothing else.

Attempt two puts a present subjunctive after si. Learners try this because si feels like a word of uncertainty, and uncertainty has meant the subjunctive for two years. Si never takes the present subjunctive either. There is no sentence in standard Spanish beginning si tenga, si sea, si vaya.

Attempt four gets the si clause right and then fumbles the other half. If the condition is imaginary, the result has to be a conditional, not a future. Aprenderé says I am going to do it; aprendería says I would, in a world I am not living in.

What matters here: after si, the choice is between an indicative tense and the imperfect subjunctive, and which one you pick decides what the other half of the sentence must be. The two clauses move together.

The three patterns

Translate the three and the difference is audible in English too: if I have time, I will learn; if I had time, I would learn; if I had had time, I would have learned.

Type one, where nothing is imaginary

This is the pattern for ordinary planning, and it is entirely indicative.

• Si llueve, no vamos a la playa. If it rains, we are not going to the beach.
• Si mi jefe llama, dile que no estoy. If my boss calls, tell him I am not in.
• Si apruebas el examen, te invito a cenar. If you pass the exam, I will take you out to dinner.

Notice that Spanish uses the present after si where English uses the present too, and that the future lives only in the other half. Si lloverá is not Spanish.

A related pattern, and a surprising one: por si acaso, meaning just in case, also takes the indicative, even though it sounds like pure hypothesis. Trae el paraguas por si acaso llueve. Bring the umbrella just in case it rains. Compare en caso de que llueva, from the ESCAPA list in Lesson 3, which takes the subjunctive and means the same thing. Two phrases, one meaning, two moods. They simply have to be learned as they are.

Type two, the one this course is built around

Here the condition is contrary to fact, or so unlikely that the speaker is treating it as fiction.

• Si tuviera un millón de euros, viajaría por todo el mundo. If I had a million euros, I would travel all over the world. I do not have it.
• Yo no haría eso si fuera tú. I would not do that if I were you. I am not you.
• Si comprendieras mi situación, no me juzgarías tan duramente. If you understood my situation, you would not judge me so harshly. You do not understand it.
• Si viviéramos más cerca, nos veríamos todos los días. If we lived closer, we would see each other every day.

English gives a clue in the first person of ser: if I were you, not if I was you. That were is the last visible piece of the English subjunctive, and it marks exactly the same unreality that fuera marks in Spanish.

Either clause may come first, with no change in meaning: Viajaría por todo el mundo si tuviera un millón de euros. When si comes first, a comma separates the two clauses; when it comes second, no comma is needed.

Type three, regret

For a condition that was never met in the past, the si clause takes the pluperfect subjunctive, which is hubiera plus a past participle. You already have both pieces: hubiera is the imperfect subjunctive of haber from Lesson 5, and the participle is the one you built in Lesson 4.

• Si me hubieran dicho eso, no habría ido. If they had told me that, I would not have gone.
• Te habría visitado si hubiera estado más tiempo en la ciudad. I would have visited you if I had been in the city longer.
• Si hubieran tenido algún problema, ya nos habrían llamado. If they had had any problem, they would have called us by now.

One thing you will hear constantly: in the result clause, many speakers use hubiera where the pattern asks for habría. Si lo hubiera sabido, lo hubiera dicho is normal, accepted Spanish across most of the Spanish-speaking world. The reverse swap is not: putting habría inside the si clause, as in si lo habría sabido, is an error everywhere.

Mixed pairs are possible whenever the logic demands them. Si hubiera estudiado medicina, ahora sería médica means if she had studied medicine, she would be a doctor now: a past condition with a present result, so a pluperfect subjunctive with a plain conditional.

Como si, which is always unreal

Como si means as if, and it compares the world with something the speaker considers false. It therefore never takes an indicative, and it never takes a present subjunctive. It takes the imperfect subjunctive for something simultaneous, and the pluperfect subjunctive for something earlier.

• Me trataban como si fuera una niña. They treated me as if I were a child. I was not.
• Sigue actuando como si no pasara nada. He goes on behaving as if nothing were happening.
• Habla del pueblo como si hubiera nacido allí. He talks about the village as if he had been born there. He was not.

Notice that the main verb can be in any tense at all. Trataban is imperfect, sigue is present, habla is present, and como si takes the same forms regardless. That makes it one of the tidiest rules in the language.

Two other jobs the word si does

First, si can mean whether, introducing an indirect question, and then it is ordinary indicative.

• No sé si viene esta noche. I do not know whether she is coming tonight.
• No saben si llegarán a tiempo. They do not know whether they will arrive in time. Here the future is legal, because this is not a condition at all.

Second, si with the imperfect indicative describes a past habit, not a hypothesis.

Si llovía, nos quedábamos en casa. If it rained, we used to stay at home. That is a rule about how those summers worked, and every verb in it is indicative.

Finally, the spelling. The conjunction si carries no accent. The word sí, with an accent, is yes, or the stressed pronoun in sí mismo. Si vienes, dime que sí. If you come, tell me yes.

Common misconceptions

• Si is a trigger for the subjunctive. It is not a trigger at all. It permits the imperfect subjunctive and the pluperfect subjunctive, forbids the present subjunctive and the conditional, and in type one takes the plain indicative.
• The conditional is the tense of the si clause. The conditional belongs to the other half. Si tuviera tiempo, aprendería, never si tendría tiempo.
• Como si can take the present subjunctive. It cannot. Como si haga frío does not exist; the form is como si hiciera frío.

Pulling it together

Go back to the four attempts. Attempt one failed because si refuses the conditional, attempt two because si refuses the present subjunctive, and attempt four because an imaginary condition cannot be answered with a future. What survives is a pair of clauses that move together: present indicative with future for what may happen, imperfect subjunctive with conditional for what is not the case, pluperfect subjunctive with conditional perfect for what never happened. Como si sits outside the three patterns and always takes one of the two past subjunctives. And si has two quieter jobs, whether and the past habit, in both of which it is entirely indicative. Remember: decide first whether the condition is real, unreal now, or unreal then. The tenses follow from that decision, and neither clause is chosen on its own.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 61. Cláusulas con si / If-clauses. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 62. Los tiempos compuestos, on the pluperfect subjunctive in si clauses referring to the past. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the chapter on construcciones condicionales. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 25 on conditional sentences. Hodder Education.

Nine o'clock, a restaurant in Valencia, two empty chairs. Marta was supposed to be here at half past eight. Somebody at the table says:

Habrá perdido el tren. She must have missed the train.

Nobody at that table knows anything about a train. The sentence is a guess, and Spanish has a special way of marking a guess about the past: it borrows a future tense and points it backwards. That trick, and the table that governs which subjunctive goes under which main clause, are what this lesson is for.

Four compound tenses, one auxiliary

Every compound tense in Spanish is haber in some form plus a past participle. You have built two. Here are all six, so the pattern is visible at once.

The participle is the same in every row, and it never agrees. Learn the six forms of haber and you have all six tenses.

Haya: a reaction now to something already finished

The present perfect subjunctive is haya plus a participle: haya, hayas, haya, hayamos, hayáis, hayan. It appears when the main clause is in the present and the thing being reacted to is already over.

• Me alegro de que hayas venido. I am glad you came. The coming is finished; the gladness is now.
• Es una lástima que no hayamos podido ir. It is a shame we could not go.
• No creo que haya llovido. I do not think it has rained.
• Es posible que ya hayan llegado. It is possible they have already arrived.
• Cuando hayas terminado el examen, levanta la mano. When you have finished the exam, put your hand up.

That last one joins this lesson to Lesson 3. Cuando takes the subjunctive for an event that has not happened, and haya terminado adds the extra idea that it will be complete at the moment in question.

Compare the pairs where certainty flips the mood, and notice that only the mood moves.

In short: haya plus a participle is the present subjunctive of a finished event. Everything you learned about when to use the present subjunctive still applies; the participle only adds that the event is over.

The sequence of tenses, in one table

Spanish does not let a main clause govern any subordinate tense it likes. The main clause sets the time from which everything is measured, and the subordinate verb is chosen relative to that.

Now three worked cases, each one read off that table.

Case one. You want to say: I am sorry that you had to wait. The regret is now, so the main clause is present: Siento. The waiting is over, and it happened before the regret. Top row, right-hand column: present perfect subjunctive. Siento que hayas tenido que esperar.

Case two. You want to say: my teacher told me to hand it in on Monday. The telling is past: Mi profesora me dijo. The handing in was still ahead of the telling. Bottom row, left-hand column: imperfect subjunctive. Mi profesora me dijo que lo entregara el lunes.

Case three. You want to say: we were glad they had arrived safely. The gladness is past: Nos alegramos. The arrival came before the gladness. Bottom row, right-hand column: pluperfect subjunctive. Nos alegramos de que hubieran llegado bien.

The one pairing that is genuinely common outside the table is a present main clause over an imperfect subjunctive, when the subordinate event is a past habit or a description rather than a single completed act: Me sorprende que Colón viajara tanto (it surprises me that Columbus travelled so much). Haya viajado is also possible there. Both are used.

Habrá: the future tense that talks about the past

Spanish II taught you that the simple future can express a present guess: ¿Dónde estará Marta? Where can Marta be? The future perfect does the same job one step back in time.

The guessing use is everywhere in speech, and it is the reason a beginner sometimes thinks a Spanish speaker is talking about the future when they are speculating about ten minutes ago.

• No contesta. Se habrá quedado sin batería. She is not answering. Her battery must have died.
• ¿Ya habrán cenado? Do you suppose they have already had dinner?
• Habrá tenido un mal día. He must have had a bad day.

Compare Perdió el tren, she missed the train, which is a statement of fact, with Habrá perdido el tren, which announces that the speaker is guessing. The difference is not politeness. It is evidence: one of them claims to know.

Habría: the same trick, one layer further back

The conditional perfect has two jobs. You met the first in Lesson 6: it is the result clause of an unreal past condition. Si me hubieran avisado, habría ido. If they had warned me, I would have gone.

The second job is a guess, but a guess made from a point in the past rather than from now. This is exactly how Quiroga uses the plain conditional in A la deriva: llevaría, would carry him, the future seen from a past moment. The conditional perfect moves one more step back.

• Serían las diez. Marta no estaba. Habría perdido el tren. It was about ten. Marta was not there. She must have missed the train.
• Nadie abría la puerta. Habrían salido a cenar. Nobody was answering the door. They had probably gone out to dinner.

Line the four up and the system is obvious: the future guesses about now, the future perfect guesses about a finished event seen from now, the conditional guesses about a moment in the past, and the conditional perfect guesses about something finished before that past moment.

Common misconceptions

• Habrá perdido is about the future. In the guessing use it is about the past. Context, and the absence of any future time expression, is what tells you which use you are looking at.
• Any main clause can govern any subjunctive. It cannot. Dudo que viniera and dudaba que venga both sound wrong to a Spanish ear; the table above is what stops you writing them.
• Haya and hubiera are interchangeable. They are not. Haya sits under a present main clause and hubiera under a past one, and after si only hubiera is possible.

What to remember

Six compound tenses, one auxiliary, one invariable participle. Haya plus a participle is the subjunctive of a finished event under a present main clause; hubiera plus a participle is the same thing under a past one. The two-row table settles every pairing you are likely to write: present and future main clauses take the present or present perfect subjunctive, past main clauses take the imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive, and you choose the left or right column by asking whether the subordinate event is earlier than the main one. Then there is the trick worth stealing for your own speech: habrá and habría do not always mean will have and would have. Very often they mean must have, and they announce that the speaker is guessing rather than reporting. Key idea: Spanish marks the difference between knowing and supposing in the verb itself, and a reader who misses that reads a guess as a fact.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 62. Los tiempos compuestos: futuro perfecto y condicional perfecto. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 63. Reacciones presentes ante hechos pasados, on the present perfect subjunctive. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the chapters on the correlación de tiempos and on the modal uses of the future and the conditional. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 14 on the compound tenses and chapter 16.12 on tense agreement with the subjunctive. Hodder Education.

On 16 September 2026, RTVE ran a news item under this headline:

Detenidas dos personas como presuntos autores materiales del tiroteo mortal de Isla Cristina.

Two people arrested as alleged perpetrators of the fatal shooting in Isla Cristina.

A third-year student looking at that headline usually reaches one of two conclusions, and both are wrong. The first is that detenidas must be an adjective, because it agrees with personas in gender and number. The second is that the sentence has no verb. Tracing why both readings fail is the fastest way into the three constructions Spanish uses when it does not want to name who did something.

Where the two readings break

Detenidas is a past participle, the same form you built in Lesson 4, and in a passive sentence a participle does agree, exactly like an adjective. So the agreement proves nothing either way.

The sentence does have a verb, but it has been deleted on purpose. Spanish newspaper headlines routinely drop the auxiliary ser to save space, in the same way English headlines drop articles. Put it back and you get the full sentence: Han sido detenidas dos personas, or Fueron detenidas dos personas. Two people have been arrested. The same headline style produced another RTVE item on the same day: Desalojado un piso en Ceuta con 25 migrantes en su interior, a flat in Ceuta with 25 migrants inside evacuated. Restore the auxiliary and it reads ha sido desalojado.

So the participle at the front of a Spanish headline is a flag: a passive sentence is coming, and its auxiliary has been left out.

Construction one: the passive with ser

The passive voice with ser is the one that looks most like English. The direct object of the active sentence becomes the subject, the verb becomes ser plus a participle, and the doer, if it is mentioned at all, follows por.

The participle agrees with the new subject: compuesta for una canción, fundada for una ciudad, detenidas for dos personas, trasladados for los migrantes. That is the opposite of what happens after haber, where the participle never moves, and it is the single most useful thing to remember about this construction.

The RTVE report on the Isla Cristina shooting uses it twice in ordinary reporting prose: the three men arrested earlier fueron enviados a prisión provisional, were sent to remand, and the motorbike used in the attack fue incendiada, was set on fire. The Ceuta report uses the present perfect version: the migrants han sido trasladados, have been moved, and a man ha sido detenido, has been arrested.

Why this matters: the ser passive is journalism, administration and formal writing. Spoken Spanish uses it far less than English uses its own passive, and a conversation that leans on it sounds translated. The two se constructions below are what speakers actually reach for.

Construction two: the passive se

Spanish can say that something gets done without naming anyone at all, by putting se in front of a third-person verb. The thing acted on stays where a subject would be, and the verb agrees with it.

• Aquí se habla español. Spanish is spoken here. One language, so habla.
• Se venden pisos. Flats for sale. More than one flat, so venden.
• Las pesquisas se iniciaron. The investigation was opened. That clause is RTVE's, from the Ceuta item, where it continues with the reason.
• En mayo de 2025 se produjeron varias detenciones. In May 2025 several arrests took place. Again RTVE's, from the Isla Cristina item, and note that detenciones is plural, so the verb is plural.

Here is the error this construction exists to catch. A learner writes:

Se vende pisos. Wrong.

The reasoning behind it is that se feels like an impersonal word meaning one or they, so the verb should stay singular. But in this construction pisos is the grammatical subject, and a Spanish verb agrees with its subject. It has to be se venden pisos. You will see the singular on hand-painted signs in shop windows across the Spanish-speaking world, and it is still an error.

The same trap catches modal verbs, where the agreement lands on the first verb and not the infinitive:

• Desde aquí se ve la catedral. You can see the cathedral from here. One cathedral.
• Desde aquí se ven las montañas. You can see the mountains from here. Several mountains, so ven.
• Se pueden comprar las entradas por internet. The tickets can be bought online. Las entradas is plural, so pueden.

Construction three: the impersonal se

Sometimes there is no thing for the verb to agree with, because the verb has no direct object at all. Then se means people in general, and the verb is locked in the third-person singular.

• Aquí se vive bien. Life is good here. Vivir has no object.
• No se puede viajar sin pasaporte. You cannot travel without a passport.
• ¿Se vivía bien allí? Was life good there?
• Se puede ver cómo se habían apilado algunos muebles. You can see how some furniture had been piled up. RTVE's wording, from the Ceuta item, and it happens to contain both an impersonal se and a passive se in one clause.

The impersonal se also appears with a human direct object, and then Spanish marks that object with the personal a and keeps the verb singular. This is the contrast worth learning by heart.

Why the difference? Because camareros in the first column is an unspecified group functioning as the subject, while los culpables in the second are particular people being acted on. Spanish keeps the personal a for them, and once there is a marked object the verb has no subject to agree with, so it stays singular.

The trap of the look-alike se

Not every se in front of a verb is one of these three. Spanish is full of pronominal verbs whose se is simply part of the verb, and of ordinary reflexives.

The test that works: ask whether somebody unnamed is doing the action to something. If yes, it is one of the two se constructions in this lesson. If the subject is doing it to itself, or if the verb simply always carries se, it is not.

One active sentence, three rewrites

Take: El ayuntamiento construyó cien viviendas el año pasado. The council built a hundred homes last year.

• Passive with ser, keeping the doer: Cien viviendas fueron construidas por el ayuntamiento el año pasado.
• Passive se, dropping the doer: Se construyeron cien viviendas el año pasado. Note the plural verb.
• Impersonal se, with a different verb that takes no object: El año pasado se construyó mucho en esta zona. There was a lot of building in this area last year.

Common misconceptions

• Se vende pisos is acceptable because se is impersonal. It is not. Pisos is the subject and the verb must agree: se venden pisos. The singular is common on signs and is corrected in every grammar.
• A participle at the start of a headline is an adjective. It is a passive with the auxiliary deleted. Detenidas dos personas is Han sido detenidas dos personas with ser removed for space.
• Spanish uses the ser passive as freely as English does. It does not. In speech the se constructions carry almost all of that work, and an over-used ser passive is one of the clearest marks of a translated text.

Looking back

Three constructions, one purpose: to talk about an action without putting the doer in the subject slot. The ser passive moves the object into the subject slot, makes the participle agree with it, and sends the doer to the end behind por. The passive se deletes the doer completely and leaves the verb agreeing with the thing acted on, which is why se venden pisos has a plural verb and se vende pisos is wrong. The impersonal se has nothing to agree with, so it stays singular, and when its object is a person that object keeps its personal a. And a Spanish headline that opens with an agreeing participle is a passive with the auxiliary knocked out. The upshot: ask what the verb has to agree with, and the three constructions sort themselves out on the page in front of you.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 49. La voz pasiva / The passive voice, including the pasiva refleja and the impersonal se. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. RTVE. (2026, 16 September). Detenidas dos personas como presuntos autores materiales del tiroteo mortal de Isla Cristina. RTVE Noticias. rtve.es
3. RTVE. (2026, 16 September). Desalojado un piso en Ceuta con 25 migrantes en su interior. RTVE Noticias. rtve.es
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2005). Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, entry se, on the agreement of the pasiva refleja and on impersonal constructions. Santillana. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)

Two sentences about the same class of students. They differ by two commas.

Los alumnos que aprobaron el examen recibieron un diploma.

Los alumnos, que aprobaron el examen, recibieron un diploma.

The first says that the students who passed got a diploma, and by implication that some did not pass and got nothing. The second says that the students got a diploma, and mentions in passing that they all passed. Two commas, two different classrooms.

That is the first thing to fix about relative clauses, and it works exactly as it does in English. A clause with no commas identifies which ones you mean. A clause inside commas adds information about all of them. English marks the same difference with that against which, and with its own commas.

The six, in one table

Que does most of the work

If you used que everywhere you would be right most of the time, and that is not a joke about learner Spanish: it is what the reference grammars say. Que covers people, things, places and ideas, and it is the only relative that can introduce an identifying clause with nothing in front of it.

• ¿Conoces al portero que trabaja aquí? Do you know the doorman who works here?
• Los poemas que escribo son fáciles de entender. The poems I write are easy to understand.
• La corriente del río, que corre seis millas, lo llevaría a Tacurú-Pucú. Quiroga's sentence from Lesson 1, with the clause inside commas because it adds rather than identifies.

English can drop its relative pronoun: the poems I write. Spanish never can. Los poemas escribo is not a sentence. Every relative clause in Spanish has a relative word in it, and leaving it out is one of the most persistent English-speaker errors at this level.

When a preposition arrives, que needs help

Put a preposition in front and Spanish reorganises. For a thing, add the article: en el que, del que, con la que. For a person, you have a choice between quien and the article form.

The bare en que survives with time and place: el año en que nací, the year I was born. Elsewhere the article is expected.

Two more relatives belong here, because they replace a preposition and a noun in one word. Donde stands for en el que when the antecedent is a place: el pueblo donde nací. Cuando does the same for time inside commas: en 1898, cuando terminó la guerra.

Quien, and the rule learners break

Quien refers only to people, and it has one hard restriction: it cannot introduce an identifying clause on its own.

• Wrong: La mujer quien vino ayer es mi tía.
• Right: La mujer que vino ayer es mi tía. The woman who came yesterday is my aunt.

English who is doing the damage here, because English uses it in exactly that slot. Spanish reserves quien for two positions: after a preposition, and inside commas.

• Este es el amigo con quien estudio español. This is the friend I study Spanish with.
• Mi vecina, quien es médica, nos ayudó mucho. My neighbour, who is a doctor, helped us a lot.
• Quien mucho abarca, poco aprieta. He who grasps at much holds little. A proverb, and the one place quien stands with no antecedent at all.

El cual, and why it exists

El cual is the formal relative. It belongs to written Spanish: contracts, academic prose, careful journalism, nineteenth-century novels. Two things make it worth knowing rather than avoiding.

First, it is normal after prepositions of more than one syllable, where el que sounds thin: la reunión durante la cual se tomó la decisión, the meeting during which the decision was taken; el puente debajo del cual duermen, the bridge they sleep under.

Second, it can clear up an ambiguity that que cannot, because it carries gender and number.

La madre del ministro, la cual llegó ayer, habló con la prensa. The minister's mother, who arrived yesterday, spoke to the press. La cual is feminine singular, so it has to be the mother. Write que there and Spanish leaves you guessing which of the two arrived.

Lo que and lo cual: pointing at a whole idea

When the thing you are referring back to is not a noun but an entire statement, Spanish uses the neuter lo que or lo cual. They are interchangeable in this job.

• Dicen que soy amable, lo cual es cierto. They say I am kind, which is true.
• Hay nubes, lo que indica lluvia. There are clouds, which means rain.
• Llegó tarde y sin avisar, lo que molestó a todos. He turned up late and without warning, which annoyed everybody.

Lo que has a second job you met in Lesson 2: with no comma and no antecedent, it means what. Lo que piensas es importante, what you think matters. Comprenden lo que decimos, they understand what we are saying.

The point: English which does both jobs, which is why English speakers write que where Spanish needs lo que. If what you are pointing at is a clause rather than a noun, the neuter form is the only option.

Cuyo, which agrees with the wrong thing

Cuyo means whose, and it behaves like a possessive adjective rather than a pronoun. It agrees with what is possessed, not with the possessor, and it sits directly in front of that thing with no article.

Two errors to avoid. Cuyo is never a question word: whose is that becomes ¿De quién es eso?, never cuyo. And cuyo takes no article after it: el autor cuyo el libro is not Spanish.

Common misconceptions

• Quien is the Spanish for who. Only in two positions. In an identifying clause Spanish uses que for people: la mujer que vino, not la mujer quien vino.
• The relative pronoun can be left out, as in English. Never. The book I read is el libro que leí, with que present.
• Cuyo agrees with the owner. It agrees with the thing owned. La escritora cuyos poemas has a masculine plural cuyos because poemas is masculine plural, although the writer is a woman.

The takeaway

Six words, and a short set of questions picks between them. Is the clause identifying or adding? No commas for the first, commas for the second, and the difference decides who got a diploma. Is there a preposition in front? Then que needs an article, or a person can take quien, or formal prose can take el cual, which is also what you use to clear up which of two nouns you meant. Is the antecedent an entire idea rather than a noun? Then it is lo que or lo cual. Is the relationship possession? Then it is cuyo, agreeing with the thing possessed. Worth holding on to: Spanish never drops the relative word, however natural that feels in English, and the clause you read in Lesson 1, la corriente del río que corre seis millas, was doing all of this two years before you had a name for it.

Sources

1. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 30. Los pronombres relativos: que, quien, el cual, cuyo, lo que. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Spanish pronouns, section on relative pronouns. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the chapter on oraciones de relativo, including the specificative and explicative contrast. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 35 on relative pronouns. Hodder Education.

On 22 December 1870 a thirty-four-year-old journalist died in Madrid, poor, three months after burying his brother. His name was Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. He had asked a friend to burn his letters and print his poems instead, on the theory that they would be worth more once he was dead.

He was right. His friends gathered the manuscripts, and in 1871 published the Obras in two volumes, partly to raise money for his widow and children. Seventy-seven short poems, the Rimas, came out of that rescue, and within a generation Spanish schoolchildren were reciting them from memory. This is the fifty-third, and it is probably the single best-known lyric poem in the language.

The words you cannot be expected to guess

Rima LIII, complete

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales
jugando llamarán.

Pero aquellas que el vuelo refrenaban
tu hermosura y mi dicha a contemplar,
aquellas que aprendieron nuestros nombres...
esas... ¡no volverán!

Volverán las tupidas madreselvas
de tu jardín las tapias a escalar,
y otra vez a la tarde, aun más hermosas,
sus flores se abrirán;

pero aquellas, cuajadas de rocío,
cuyas gotas mirábamos temblar
y caer, como lágrimas del día...
esas... ¡no volverán!

Volverán del amor en tus oídos
las palabras ardientes a sonar;
tu corazón de su profundo sueño
tal vez despertará;

pero mudo y absorto y de rodillas,
como se adora a Dios ante su altar,
como yo te he querido... desengáñate,
¡así no te querrán!

A note on spelling before the translation. The 1885 edition on Wikisource keeps the printing conventions of its own century: it writes the preposition a with an accent, á, and it opens an exclamation without the inverted mark. The text above is given in modern spelling, with those two conventions updated and nothing else touched.

The English, once

The dark swallows will come back to hang their nests on your balcony, and once again they will knock at your window panes with their wings, playing. But those that used to check their flight to look at your beauty and my happiness, those that learned our names, those will not come back.

The thick honeysuckle will come back to climb the walls of your garden, and once again, towards evening, its flowers will open, lovelier still. But those beaded with dew, whose drops we watched tremble and fall like the tears of the day, those will not come back.

Burning words of love will come back to sound in your ears; your heart will perhaps wake from its deep sleep. But silent and rapt and on its knees, as one worships God before his altar, as I have loved you, face it, no one will love you like that.

Reading it with this course in your hand

Go back to the Spanish and look at what the grammar is doing.

Volverán opens three of the six stanzas. It is a plain future, and it is the same word as the last word of the poem, querrán. Everything that returns is in that tense: swallows, honeysuckle, words. The poem is built on a promise that the world keeps.

Refrenaban and mirábamos are imperfects, and they are the only imperfects in the poem. Both describe something that used to go on and no longer does: the swallows that would check their flight, the two of them watching the dew tremble. That is Lesson 1's preterite and imperfect contrast doing structural work, because aprendieron, the one preterite, marks the single completed fact underneath the habit. Those particular birds learned their names, once and for all, and then the poem shuts them out.

Cuyas gotas mirábamos temblar. There is Lesson 9, printed in 1871. Cuyas is feminine plural because it agrees with gotas, not with the honeysuckle flowers that own them.

Como se adora a Dios ante su altar. And there is Lesson 8. That is an impersonal se with a personal a in front of its object, and the verb stays singular: as one worships God. Bécquer does not say who is doing the worshipping, because the point is that anybody would.

Como yo te he querido... así no te querrán. A present perfect against a future, and the whole poem lands on the gap between them. Note that querrán is a they with no people in it: Spanish can leave the subject completely unspecified in the third-person plural, exactly as English says they will never love you like that.

The point: the sound is doing something too. Every second line ends on a stressed a: colgar, llamarán, contemplar, volverán, escalar, abrirán, temblar, volverán, sonar, despertará, altar, querrán. That is assonance, a rhyme on the vowel alone, and it is the commonest rhyme in Spanish popular verse. It also means that the poem's last sound is the same as its fourth, so the ending feels less like a conclusion than like a door closing on the same note.

Thirty-five years later, a different Spanish

Rubén Darío was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento on 18 January 1867 in Metapa, a Nicaraguan village now called Ciudad Darío, and he died in León in 1916 at forty-nine. In between he started modernismo, the movement that pulled Spanish poetry out of the nineteenth century, and he did it largely from Buenos Aires, Paris and Madrid rather than from any capital in Spain.

Cantos de vida y esperanza appeared in 1905. Its last poem is fourteen lines long and it is called Lo fatal, which does not mean fatal. Lo plus an adjective makes an abstract noun, so the title is something like what is inescapable, or the doom in things.

Lo fatal, complete

Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo,
y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente,
pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo,
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.

Ser y no saber nada, y ser sin rumbo cierto,
y el temor de haber sido y un futuro terror...
Y el espanto seguro de estar mañana muerto,
y sufrir por la vida y por la sombra y por

lo que no conocemos y apenas sospechamos,
y la carne que tienta con sus frescos racimos,
y la tumba que aguarda con sus fúnebres ramos,
¡y no saber a dónde vamos,
ni de dónde venimos!...

In English: Lucky the tree, which is barely capable of feeling, and luckier the hard stone, because that one no longer feels at all, since there is no grief greater than the grief of being alive, and no heavier sorrow than a conscious life. To be, and to know nothing, and to be with no certain bearing, and the fear of having been, and a future terror... And the certain dread of being dead tomorrow, and suffering for life and for the dark and for what we do not know and barely suspect, and the flesh that tempts with its fresh clusters, and the tomb that waits with its funeral wreaths, and not to know where we are going, nor where we came from.

What Darío does that Bécquer does not

Start with the grammar, because it is unusually visible here.

Lo que no conocemos y apenas sospechamos. The neuter relative from Lesson 9, used at full stretch: there is no noun anywhere for it to attach to, and that is the point. What the speaker suffers for has no name.

El temor de haber sido. A perfect infinitive: haber plus a participle with no conjugated verb at all. English does the same thing with having been. It is the most economical way Spanish has of putting a completed action inside a noun phrase.

La carne que tienta and la tumba que aguarda are two identifying relative clauses, built exactly alike, one after the other. Darío is balancing them on purpose: temptation and the grave, same shape, same length, twelve words apart.

Now the shape. The first eleven lines are long and regular. Then the twelfth and thirteenth are short, and the sentence falls off the end of the poem into two questions that are not asked as questions. Read it aloud and you can hear the floor give way. Bécquer's short line comes at the same place in every stanza and is therefore a rhythm; Darío's short lines come once, at the end, and are therefore a collapse.

And the diction. Bécquer writes with almost no unusual words: golondrina, nido, jardín, altar. Darío writes racimos and fúnebres ramos, a vocabulary of clusters and wreaths, and puts an adjective in a place Spanish does not expect it. That taste for the ornamental, the classical and the exact word is what modernismo meant.

Common misconceptions

• Lo fatal means fatal. Lo plus an adjective makes an abstract noun in Spanish: lo bueno is what is good, lo difícil is the difficult part. The title means something nearer to what cannot be escaped.
• A poem has to be translated line by line to be understood. Both poems above were printed whole, in Spanish, with a word list. That is how a reader at this level should meet verse: the English comes afterwards, as a check.
• The dark swallows are a metaphor for death. They are swallows. The poem is about particular birds that learned two names, and the loss is precise rather than symbolic. Reading every concrete noun in a poem as a symbol is the fastest way to stop noticing what it actually says.

Summing up

Two poems, thirty-four years apart, both of them read here without a translation running down the margin. Bécquer builds his out of the plainest words in the language and a single grammatical contrast, the future against the imperfect, and rhymes every second line on the same vowel so that the poem closes on the note it opened with. Darío builds his out of infinitives with no subject, a neuter relative with no antecedent, and two matched relative clauses, and then breaks his own line lengths at the end so that the poem stops without landing. In both, the grammar of this course is doing the work: cuyas gotas, como se adora a Dios, lo que no conocemos, el temor de haber sido. Bottom line: you are no longer reading around a poem in Spanish. You are reading it, and the vocabulary list is the only help you needed.

Sources

1. Bécquer, G. A. (1885). Rima LIII, Volverán las oscuras golondrinas. In Obras de Gustavo A. Bécquer. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
2. Darío, R. (1905). Lo fatal. In Cantos de vida y esperanza. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, on his death in December 1870 and the posthumous Obras of 1871. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Rubén Darío, on his birth at Metapa in 1867 and Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

In 1689 a printer in Madrid, Juan García Infanzón, produced a book of poems by a nun who had never left New Spain. The money came from the departing Vicereine, María Luisa Manrique de Lara, who carried the manuscripts across the Atlantic. The book was called Inundación castálida, and inside it was a poem that opens by calling its readers stupid.

Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón. Foolish men who accuse women without cause.

The nun was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, born in 1648 near Amecameca, cloistered in Mexico City from 1669, dead in 1695 at forty-six after nursing other nuns through a plague. The poem is a set of redondillas: four-line stanzas of eight syllables rhyming abba. Seventeen of them, arguing a case.

The gloss

Six redondillas

The text below is the Wikisource copy in modern spelling, with the inverted question marks restored. Six of the seventeen stanzas are printed here.

Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis;

si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
¿por qué queréis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia.

Queréis, con presunción necia,
hallar a la que buscáis,
para pretendida, Thais,
y en la posesión, Lucrecia.

Opinión, ninguna gana,
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana.

¿O cuál es de más culpar,
aunque cualquiera mal haga:
la que peca por la paga
o el que paga por pecar?

In English: Foolish men who accuse women without cause, without seeing that you are the cause of the very thing you blame them for. If with unequalled eagerness you court their refusal, why do you want them to behave well when you are urging them towards the bad? You batter down their resistance and then, gravely, you say that what your own persistence achieved was looseness on their part. You want, with stupid conceit, to find the woman you are after to be Thais while you are courting her and Lucretia once you have her. No opinion wins: the woman who is most careful of herself, if she does not accept you is cold, and if she does accept you is loose. Or which is the more to blame, however badly either behaves: the woman who sins for the payment, or the man who pays in order to sin?

Thais was a celebrated Athenian courtesan, Lucretia a Roman matron famous for her chastity. Sor Juana expects her reader to know both, and the joke is that one person cannot be both.

Every verb in it is vosotros

Acusáis, culpáis, solicitáis, queréis, incitáis, combatís, decís, buscáis. The whole poem addresses its targets as vosotros, the plural you of Spain, and this is worth stopping on, because it is where a live regional difference sits.

Sor Juana lived and died in Mexico City, where a speaker today would say ustedes acusan. She writes vosotros because that was the form of literary Spanish in 1689, on both sides of the Atlantic. So the vosotros in a seventeenth-century poem tells you about the page, not about the poet's street.

Two more pieces of your own grammar are sitting in these stanzas. Lo que hizo la diligencia is the neuter relative from Lesson 9, standing in for a whole unnamed thing. Aunque cualquiera mal haga is aunque with the subjunctive from Lesson 3, conceding a possibility in order to sweep it aside: however badly either of them may behave.

The dispute: what kind of poem is this?

Readers have argued about these redondillas for three centuries, and the argument is worth having because both sides are holding real evidence.

The first reading. It is an argument, not a complaint, and it is built like one. Each stanza sets a trap and closes it. The woman who refuses is cold; the woman who accepts is loose; therefore the standard is not a standard but a device. The final couplet turns a moral question into a symmetry that cannot be escaped: la que peca por la paga, el que paga por pecar. And it was written by a woman, printed under her name in Madrid, and read across the Spanish-speaking world. On this reading the poem is among the earliest sustained attacks on a sexual double standard in the Americas.

The second reading. Poems complaining about men and women arguing past each other were a European genre with a long history before 1689, and the tools here are Baroque tools: classical references, antithesis, a couplet that snaps shut, wit measured out in eight-syllable lines. Thais and Lucrecia are not observations about Mexico City; they are furniture from a shared literary attic. On this reading the poem is a brilliant performance inside a convention, and reading it as a personal manifesto imports a twentieth-century idea of what poems are for.

What would settle it. Not the poem alone, which is why the dispute lasts. What moves it is the rest of her work. In 1690 she wrote the Autodefensa espiritual to her confessor, and in 1691 the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, in which she defends a woman's right to study and to publish, in prose, in her own voice, with no genre to hide behind. If you read the redondillas after the Respuesta, the case for the first reading gets a great deal stronger, because the argument in the poem turns out to be one she also made when she was not being witty.

Why this matters: the question is not whether Sor Juana was a feminist, which is a word from another century. The question is what evidence a reader is allowed to bring to a poem, and how much of it lies outside the page.

Two hundred and thirty years later, twelve lines

Alfonsina Storni was born in Switzerland in 1892, grew up in Argentina, worked as a teacher and a journalist in Buenos Aires, and published Irremediablemente in 1919. She knew Horacio Quiroga, the writer of Lesson 1: he mentioned her in his letters between 1919 and 1922 and treated her as an equal, which was not the ordinary treatment of a woman writer in that city. She died in 1938 at Mar del Plata.

Tú me dijiste: no lloró mi padre;
tú me dijiste: no lloró mi abuelo;
no han llorado los hombres de mi raza,
eran de acero.

Así diciendo te brotó una lágrima
y me cayó en la boca... más veneno
yo no he bebido nunca en otro vaso
así pequeño.

Débil mujer, pobre mujer que entiende,
dolor de siglos conocí al beberlo:
oh, el alma mía soportar no puede
todo su peso.

In English: You said to me, my father never wept; you said to me, my grandfather never wept; the men of my line have not wept, they were made of steel. As he said it a tear welled up in him and fell into my mouth, and I have never drunk more poison from so small a glass. Weak woman, poor woman who understands: I knew the grief of centuries as I drank it. Oh, my soul cannot bear all its weight.

Four things the Spanish is doing

Te brotó una lágrima. That is the construction you met in Lesson 1, in dislocándole las vértebras: Spanish marks the person affected with an indirect object rather than with a possessive. Literally, a tear welled up on you. Storni does not write tu lágrima, and the difference is that the tear is something happening to him rather than something he owns.

No lloró mi padre against no han llorado los hombres de mi raza. A preterite for one man's finished life, a present perfect for a line of men whose record is still open. Then eran de acero, an imperfect, for the state they were in. Three past forms in three lines, each doing a different job, and all three are Spanish II grammar being used at full stretch.

El alma mía. Alma is feminine, but it begins with a stressed a, so the singular article is el: el alma, el agua, el águila, el hacha. The adjectives stay feminine, which is why the plural is las almas and why Storni writes mía and not mío.

Pobre mujer que entiende. An identifying relative clause in the indicative, and it identifies her. Not a woman who might understand. This one does.

The second dispute, and this one is inside the text

Whose weight is the poem about?

Read it one way and the answer is the speaker's. She is the one who says débil mujer, she is the one who drinks, she is the one who cannot carry it. The title names an inheritance, and the last line puts it on her soul.

Read it the other way and the poison is manufactured by the men. The tear is his. It arrives precisely at the moment he insists that men of his family do not cry, and it arrives without his permission. What she tastes is the cost of a rule imposed on him, which is why it is dolor de siglos rather than dolor mío.

Both readings are in the twelve lines, and the poem does not choose. What it does is put the tear in the wrong mouth: he sheds it, she swallows it, and that transfer is the event the poem exists to record.

Common misconceptions

• Vosotros is old-fashioned Spanish. It is current, everyday Spanish in most of Spain. What is true is that it is not used in Latin America, where ustedes covers both the formal and the informal plural.
• El alma means alma is masculine. It is feminine. The article changes only in the singular, and only before a stressed a, to stop two identical vowels colliding. Las almas, el alma mía.
• A poem written by a woman about women is automatically a protest. That is the question, not the answer, and Sor Juana's redondillas are the case where the evidence on both sides is real.

Recap

Two poems, two arguments, two disputes. Sor Juana builds seventeen four-line traps out of vosotros verbs and Roman names, and readers still disagree about whether that is an indictment or a virtuoso turn inside an old genre; the thing that moves the argument is not the poem but the prose she wrote two years later. Storni writes twelve lines in which a man denies that men cry and then cries, and the poem refuses to say whose inheritance is heavier. Along the way you have read an indirect object marking the person a tear happens to, a preterite and a present perfect sorting one life from a lineage, a neuter relative doing the work of an unnamed noun, and the article that switches gender in front of a stressed a. The core of it: a text from 1689 and a text from 1919 are both reachable with the grammar you already have, and the difficult part is not the Spanish but deciding what the evidence supports.

Sources

1. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. (1689). Redondillas, Hombres necios que acusáis. In Inundación castálida. Madrid: Juan García Infanzón. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
2. Storni, A. (1919). Peso ancestral. In Irremediablemente. Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Editorial Buenos Aires. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the 1689 Inundación castálida, the Autodefensa espiritual of 1690 and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea of 1691. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Alfonsina Storni, on Irremediablemente (1919) and her correspondence with Horacio Quiroga. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The most famous sentence in Spanish begins with a place the narrator refuses to name.

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

In a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember, there lived not long ago a gentleman of the sort who keep a lance in the rack, an old shield, a lean nag and a greyhound for coursing.

Miguel de Cervantes published that in 1605, and the relative pronoun in it is one you learned three lessons ago. De cuyo nombre: cuyo agreeing with nombre, the thing possessed, with the preposition de in front because acordarse takes de. Four hundred and twenty years later the rule has not moved an inch.

This lesson puts two famous openings beside modern Spanish and asks a plain question: what has actually changed?

Fifty years earlier, a hungrier book

La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes appeared anonymously in 1554 and invented the picaresque novel: a poor boy narrating his own life, in the first person, to a social superior who has asked for an explanation. Here is the first paragraph, in the 1921 Calpe edition on Wikisource, which keeps the old forms.

Pues sepa vuestra merced, ante todas cosas, que a mí me llaman Lázaro de Tormes, hijo de Tomé González y de Antona Pérez, naturales de Tejares, aldea de Salamanca. Mi nacimiento fué dentro del río Tormes, por la cual causa tomé el sobrenombre, y fué desta manera. Mi padre, que Dios perdone, tenía cargo de proveer una molienda de una aceña que está ribera de aquel río, en la cual fué molinero más de quince años. Y estando mi madre una noche en la aceña, preñada de mí, tomóle el parto y parióme allí. De manera que con verdad me puedo decir nascido en el río.

In English: Well, your worship should know, before anything else, that I am called Lázaro de Tormes, son of Tomé González and Antona Pérez, natives of Tejares, a village near Salamanca. My birth took place inside the river Tormes, which is how I got the name, and it happened like this. My father, God forgive him, had charge of supplying a grinding mill on the bank of that river, where he was the miller for more than fifteen years. And my mother, being in the mill one night, pregnant with me, went into labour and gave birth to me there. So that I can truly say I was born in the river.

Seven things that have since disappeared

Remember: the third row is the one that will trip you while reading. When you see a verb ending in a pronoun, peel it off and put it in front: parióme is me parió, habíale miedo is le tenía miedo, fuíle queriendo bien is le fui queriendo bien, I came to be fond of him.

And what has not changed at all

Now the more surprising column. Read the two passages again looking for the grammar of this course, and it is all there, working exactly as it works today.

• Sepa vuestra merced. A present subjunctive used as a polite command to usted. Identical to sepa usted today.
• De cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme. Cuyo agreeing with the thing possessed, after a preposition. Lesson 9, unchanged.
• Una aceña que está ribera de aquel río, en la cual fué molinero. Two relative clauses, one with que and one with el cual after a preposition, exactly as Lesson 9 lays them out.
• Vivía un hidalgo ... consumían las tres partes de su hacienda ... Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años. Imperfects, all of them, describing a standing situation before anything happens. Lesson 1.
• Tomé el sobrenombre ... olvidó casi de todo punto el ejercicio de la caza ... vendió muchas hanegas de tierra. Preterites, moving the clock.
• Estando mi madre una noche en la aceña. A gerund clause with its own subject, still perfectly normal Spanish.

That is the payoff of three modules of grammar. The changes between 1554 and now are a short list of spellings and one rule about pronoun position. The structure of the sentence is the structure you have been building.

The other kind of distance

Four centuries is one axis. The other is geography, and it matters more for a reader alive now. Three differences are worth knowing by name.

Seseo. Most of Spain distinguishes two sounds: the s of casa and the th sound of caza, written z, or c before e and i. Latin America, the Canary Islands and much of Andalusia do not distinguish them, and pronounce both as s. That is seseo, and it is by a wide margin the pronunciation of most Spanish speakers in the world. So casa and caza, cocer and coser, are homophones for hundreds of millions of people, and context sorts them out. The English label Castilian lisp is both inaccurate and unhelpful: a lisp is a speech difficulty, and this is a phoneme distinction that one region kept and another merged.

Voseo. In Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia and much of Central America, the ordinary familiar singular is not tú but vos, with its own verb endings.

The stress moves to the last syllable and the stem change disappears: tú tienes but vos tenés, tú puedes but vos podés. A speaker in Buenos Aires says ¿Vos sos de acá? Are you from around here? The preterite, the imperfect, the future and the subjunctive are the same as for tú in most places.

The plural. Lesson 11 covered this on Sor Juana's verbs: vosotros in most of Spain, ustedes everywhere else for both registers.

Words that change at the border

None of these makes anybody wrong. They are the Spanish equivalent of lorry and truck, and a learner who can recognise both columns can talk to anybody.

Common misconceptions

• Old Spanish is a different language. The changes between 1554 and now come to a short list: some spellings, some pronoun positions, and vuestra merced turning into usted. The grammar of the clause is the grammar you have.
• Voseo is slang or bad Spanish. It was treated that way by nineteenth-century grammarians, including in Chile, where a deliberate campaign pushed it back. It is now recognised as a regional standard, and in Argentina it appears on billboards, in newspapers and in dictionaries.
• Spaniards lisp. They distinguish two sounds that most other speakers merged. Calling the distinction a lisp confuses a regional phoneme system with a speech difficulty.

Where this leaves us

Two openings, four hundred and seventy years apart from your own Spanish, and both of them readable with a word list and one rule about pronouns. Peel the pronoun off a verb like parióme, expand desta into de esta, read fué as fue, and translate vuestra merced as usted, and Lazarillo's first paragraph is modern Spanish with an odd coat on. Cervantes needs even less: his first sentence uses a relative pronoun you can already parse. On the other axis, the living one, a reader has to handle seseo, which is how most Spanish speakers pronounce c and z, the vos forms that run from Buenos Aires to Guatemala, and a vocabulary that swaps coche for carro at the Atlantic. In short: the Spanish that separates you from Cervantes is a spelling problem; the Spanish that separates Madrid from Montevideo is a live and perfectly ordinary variety, and you should be able to read and hear both.

Sources

1. Anónimo. (1554/1921). Tratado primero. In El Lazarillo de Tormes. Madrid: Editorial Calpe. Text consulted at Wikisource en español
2. Cervantes Saavedra, M. de. (1605). Capítulo primero. In El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Text consulted at Project Gutenberg
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Seseo, on the absence of the s and th distinction in Latin America, the Canary Islands and parts of southern Spain. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Voseo, on the distribution of vos and its verb forms. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Here is the top of a real article, published by RTVE on 10 September 2026.

Árboles o bicis: las ciudades españolas no se adaptan al cambio climático lo suficientemente rápido

Un estudio publicado en The Lancet analiza los impactos climáticos y las soluciones en 850 urbes europeas.

Pamplona destaca en movilidad sostenible y Cuenca, en superficie arbolada.

Trees or bikes: Spanish cities are not adapting to climate change fast enough. A study published in The Lancet analyses climate impacts and solutions in 850 European urban areas. Pamplona stands out for sustainable mobility and Cuenca for tree cover.

A reader who has finished Spanish II can decode every word of that. A reader who has not been shown how a Spanish article is built will still read it four times slower than a Spanish teenager does, because the shape of the page is carrying information that the words do not repeat. That shape is what this lesson is for.

The parts, and what each is obliged to say

The ordering principle is the inverted pyramid, in Spanish la pirámide invertida: the most important information first, the least important last, so that a reader can stop at any point and an editor can cut from the bottom. That has a direct consequence for you. You are allowed to stop. If you have read the titular, the subtítulo and the entradilla, you have the story. Everything after that is detail.

What matters here: reading a newspaper in a foreign language is not a test of stamina. The article is designed to be abandoned, and a reader who finishes every article is using the paper wrongly.

Headlines are written in a dialect of their own

Four habits account for most of what looks strange in a Spanish headline.

One: the present tense for things that have already happened. Bruselas plantea prohibir las redes sociales a los menores de 13 años means Brussels has proposed banning social media for under-13s. The proposal was made yesterday; the headline uses plantea. This is called the historic present, and English headlines do the same thing.

Two: no verb at all. Granada, una perenne isla de calor. Granada, a permanent heat island. A noun, a comma, a description. The comma is doing the work of es.

Three: a colon or a dash splitting the headline in two. Árboles o bicis: las ciudades españolas no se adaptan. De Cuenca a Cádiz: las ciudades con mayor y menor superficie arbolada. The part before the colon is the hook; the part after it is the fact.

Four: the participle with ser deleted, which you met in Lesson 8. Detenidas dos personas. Desalojado un piso. Restore the auxiliary and read it as a passive.

Who said it: the attribution verbs

Spanish journalism marks the source of every claim, and it does so with a small set of verbs that a reader needs to recognise on sight.

Now the one that catches every learner. Spanish journalism uses the conditional to mark information that has not been confirmed.

• El incendio habría comenzado en una finca privada. The fire is thought to have started on a private estate.
• Los implicados serían migrantes, según fuentes policiales. Those involved are said to be migrants, according to police sources.
• Buscan a una mujer que podría haber sido arrastrada por una riada. They are searching for a woman who may have been swept away by a flash flood.

That is Lesson 7's conjectural conditional doing professional work. When you see a conditional in a news report with no si clause anywhere near it, the journalist is telling you that nobody has confirmed this yet, and you should read it as reportedly.

Numbers are punctuated the other way round

This trips up English readers on the first line of data they meet.

The dot groups thousands and the comma marks the decimal, which is the opposite of English practice. Read 168,1 as a hundred and sixty-eight point one, not as a hundred and sixty-eight thousand one hundred.

Two more constructions carry data in Spanish reporting. Pasando de 25,7 a 168,1 means going from 25.7 to 168.1. Respecto al periodo de referencia means compared with the baseline period. Both appear in the RTVE article above, in the sentence reporting that heat-related mortality in Castellón de la Plana rose by 553 percent between the 1991 to 2000 baseline and the decade from 2015 to 2024.

The vocabulary of the environment

Notice urbe in the standfirst, a formal word for a city used to avoid repeating ciudad. Spanish journalism dislikes repeating a noun, so it keeps a stock of synonyms in play: ciudad, urbe, municipio, localidad; país, nación, Estado; el Gobierno, el Ejecutivo; la policía, los agentes, el instituto armado. If a paragraph seems to have introduced a new actor, check first whether it is the same one under another name.

A procedure for reading one in four minutes

1. Read the titular and the subtítulo. Write one English sentence saying what happened. If you cannot, read them again before going on.
2. Read the entradilla. Answer the six questions: qué, quién, cuándo, dónde, cómo, por qué. Some will be missing, and their absence is itself information.
3. Read only the ladillos. They give you the shape of the rest.
4. Choose one section and read it properly, underlining no more than five unknown words.
5. Look up those five. Not the other thirty.

Step five is the one people skip in the wrong direction. A page of a newspaper contains hundreds of words you do not know, and looking them all up converts a four-minute task into an hour and teaches you almost nothing, because a word met once in a list does not stay.

Common misconceptions

• A conditional in a news report means something would happen under some condition. Usually it means the opposite: the journalist is marking a claim as unconfirmed. Serían migrantes means they are said to be migrants.
• You have to finish the article. The inverted pyramid exists so that you do not. Stopping after the entradilla is the intended use.
• 25,7 is twenty-five thousand seven hundred. It is twenty-five point seven. Spanish reverses the two marks, and misreading them turns a mortality rate into a body count.

The short version

A Spanish news article is a machine with named parts, and each part has a job: the titular carries the biggest fact, the subtítulo the next ones, the entradilla the whole story in a paragraph, and the cuerpo the same story again with the detail added in falling order. Headlines run in the present tense about the past, sometimes drop the verb entirely, often split at a colon, and regularly delete the ser of a passive. Attribution is explicit, with según and a small family of verbs, and a conditional with no si clause is a journalist telling you that nobody has confirmed this. Numbers reverse the English punctuation. The upshot: read the top, read the subheadings, pick one section, and look up five words. That is what a fluent reader does, and it is available to you now.

Sources

1. RTVE. (2026, 10 September). Árboles o bicis: las ciudades españolas no se adaptan al cambio climático lo suficientemente rápido. RTVE Noticias. rtve.es
2. RTVE. (2026, 2 September). La ONU asume que el calentamiento global superará los 1,5 ºC, pero ve aún posible reducir las temperaturas a largo plazo. RTVE Noticias. rtve.es
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pirámide invertida, on the lead, the entradilla and the body of a news item. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
4. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2010). Ortografía de la lengua española, on the use of the comma as a decimal separator and on the writing of percentages. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)

In 2018 Alfonso Cuarón filmed Roma in black and white, in Spanish and Mixtec, about a household in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City in 1970 and 1971. Watch it with English subtitles and you will follow every turn of the story, be moved by the end of it, and learn no Spanish at all.

That is not a criticism of subtitles. It is a description of what eyes do. Given text in a language you read fluently, you read it, and the soundtrack becomes background. Within about a minute your attention has left the audio entirely, and two hours later you have had a fine evening and gained nothing.

The fix is not to ban subtitles. It is to use a film more than once, with a different setting each time, and to know what each pass is for.

One honest note before the method. Research on whether same-language subtitles help language learners is mixed, and depends on the learner's level, the task and what is being measured. What follows is a teaching procedure that works with how attention behaves, not a finding from a controlled trial.

The four passes, over one film

Pass one exists so that you can stop worrying about the plot. Curiosity about what happens next is the enemy of listening: it makes you skip ahead and read. Kill it first. Use English subtitles without guilt, or none at all if the film is visual enough.

Pass two is the one that does the work. Spanish audio with Spanish subtitles solves a specific problem: you have thousands of words you can read and cannot hear. Spoken Spanish runs vowels together across word boundaries, so no lo he visto arrives as one long sound. Seeing the four words while hearing the one sound is what eventually teaches your ear to cut it into pieces. Expect pass two to feel slower and less enjoyable than pass one. That is the sign it is working.

Pass three is a written exercise. Choose a four-minute scene with two people talking. Play it in ten-second pieces, and write down ten expressions: not single words, but chunks. Ya te dije que no, a lo mejor, de todas formas, no te preocupes, ¿y eso por qué? Chunks are what a speaker actually produces, and they come out of your mouth whole.

Pass four is the measurement. Same scene, subtitles off. If you understand most of it, you have learned that scene. If you do not, you have learned something more useful: which sounds your ear still cannot cut.

Key idea: one film watched four times in this way is worth more than eight films watched once each with English subtitles.

What to listen for once you can hear anything

Spoken Spanish is held together by small words that carry no dictionary meaning and enormous conversational weight. They are the first thing a subtitler cuts, which is another reason not to trust an English subtitle as a record of what was said.

Listen also for the pronoun switches, because they carry information no subtitle shows. A character who moves from usted to tú halfway through a scene has just changed the relationship. A character in Buenos Aires who says vos to one person and usted to another is sorting the room by age or status. In El laberinto del fauno, set in Francoist Spain in 1944, the difference between how a captain is addressed and how he addresses others is a large part of what the film is about, and English has one word for all of it.

Three films, and what each one asks of you

Roma (2018, Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico). A semi-autobiographical film about Cleo, a live-in Mixtec housekeeper in an upper-middle-class household in Mexico City, across 1970 and 1971, ending with the family on a beach at Tuxpan and, earlier, with the Corpus Christi massacre of 10 June 1971 outside a furniture shop. It is the best first film in this list: the pace is slow, there are long stretches with no dialogue at all, and what dialogue there is comes from a household, so the vocabulary is domestic and repeated. Some of it is in Mixtec rather than Spanish, which is part of the point.

El laberinto del fauno (2006, Guillermo del Toro, a Spain and Mexico co-production). Summer 1944, in the mountains of Francoist Spain. Ofelia arrives with her pregnant mother at the outpost of her stepfather, Captain Vidal, who is hunting the maquis, the anti-Franco guerrillas still in the hills. The Spanish is peninsular, the military register is clipped and formal, and the fantasy sections use an older, more ceremonious Spanish than the rest. This is a film for the top of this age range and not below it: it is violent, and it is classified accordingly.

Machuca (2004, Andrés Wood, Chile). Santiago in the months before the coup of September 1973, told through two twelve-year-old boys at an elite Catholic school where the headmaster has begun admitting pupils from the shantytown. It is the hardest of the three for a learner, and worth knowing why: Chilean Spanish is fast, it drops final consonants, and the children speak in slang. Do not make it your first film. Make it your fifth, and shorten the pass-three scene to two minutes.

The second worked example, where the method has to bend

Run the four passes on Roma and they work as written. Run them on Machuca and pass four collapses: you take the subtitles off and understand almost nothing, because the speech rate and the local vocabulary are both beyond you.

The correct response is not to give up on the film and not to grind the same scene twenty times. It is to change two inputs.

1. Shorten pass three from four minutes to two, and take twenty expressions from it instead of ten. A harder text needs a smaller sample.
2. Change the target of pass four. Instead of understanding the scene, aim to hear where the words end. Being able to write down the number of words in a line you cannot translate is real progress with a fast variety, and it is the step that comes before comprehension.

The same adjustment applies to any Caribbean, Andalusian or Chilean film, and to any recording of two friends interrupting each other.

Finding the films, and the words on the listing

Spain has an unusually strong dubbing tradition. Dubbing was generalised there from 1932 and reinforced by a government rule of 23 April 1941, which is why Spanish cinema listings still mark the subtitled originals specially as V.O.S.E. If you are choosing a streaming audio track, check that you have the original Spanish and not a dub of an English film, which will have the rhythm of English underneath it.

Common misconceptions

• Subtitles in your own language are cheating. They are a tool with one correct use, which is pass one. The error is using them for all four passes, because then your eyes never leave the bottom of the screen.
• If you cannot understand a film you are not ready for films. You are not ready for that film, at that speed, without the four passes. Roma and Machuca are both Spanish and one of them is roughly twice as hard.
• The subtitles say what the characters said. Subtitles are compressed to fit a reading speed, and the first things cut are exactly the discourse markers, the repetitions and the pronoun choices that carry the social meaning.

Putting it together

Pass one buys off your curiosity about the plot. Pass two, Spanish audio over Spanish subtitles, is the pass that teaches your ear to cut a stream of sound into words. Pass three mines a short scene for whole expressions, because chunks are what speakers produce. Pass four takes the support away and measures what is left. When a film is too fast, shorten the scene and lower the target from understanding to hearing the boundaries between words. Along the way, listen for bueno, pues, o sea, vale and claro, and for the moment a character switches from usted to tú, because none of that will be in the subtitle. In short: one film, four passes, and the difference between an enjoyable evening and a session of listening practice is entirely in which track you have switched on.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roma (2018 film), on its setting in Colonia Roma in 1970 and 1971 and its Spanish and Mixtec dialogue. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pan's Labyrinth, on the 1944 Francoist setting and the Spain and Mexico co-production. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Machuca, on the Santiago setting in the months before the September 1973 coup. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Doblaje, on the generalisation of dubbing in Spain from 1932 and the rule of 23 April 1941. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
5. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (2012). ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012, Interpretive Listening: Intermediate. ACTFL. (The ACTFL site redirects automated requests to its terms page, so this is cited unlinked.)

A pharmacy in Salamanca. The learner has cut a finger and needs a sticking plaster. The Spanish word is tirita in Spain and curita in much of Latin America, and the learner knows neither.

Farmacéutica: Buenos días, ¿qué desea?

Cliente: Buenos días. Quiero... eh... (silence)

Farmacéutica: ¿Perdone?

Cliente: Nada, nada. Gracias.

The conversation is over, and the finger is still bleeding. What went wrong is not the missing word. Every speaker in every language reaches for words that are not there. What went wrong is that the learner had no move to make when it happened, and treated the gap as the end of the exchange rather than as a normal event inside it.

This lesson is four sets of moves. None of them is grammar you have not met. All of them are fixed phrases, and fixed phrases are the only thing that arrives fast enough to be useful when your mind has gone blank.

Move one: talk around the word

Circumlocution is describing a thing you cannot name until the other person names it for you. It has a standard toolkit.

Now the same pharmacy, repaired.

Farmacéutica: Buenos días, ¿qué desea?

Cliente: Buenos días. Perdone, no sé cómo se dice en español. Es una cosa pequeña que se pone en un dedo cuando te cortas. Es como un papel pero pegajoso.

Farmacéutica: Ah, una tirita. ¿De qué tamaño?

Cliente: Pequeña, para el dedo. ¿Se dice tirita en toda España?

Farmacéutica: Aquí sí. En México le dicen curita.

In English: Good morning, what would you like? Good morning. Sorry, I do not know how to say it in Spanish. It is a small thing you put on a finger when you cut yourself. It is like paper but sticky. Ah, a plaster. What size? Small, for a finger. Do people say tirita everywhere in Spain? Here, yes. In Mexico they call it curita.

Count what the learner produced: a relative clause with a passive se, a comparison, and a question. All of it is Spanish II and III grammar, and not one word of it was the word they wanted.

The point: circumlocution is not a second-best strategy for weak speakers. It is what fluent speakers of any language do several times an hour, and the only difference is that they do it without stopping.

Move two: ask for clarification without apologising into silence

A single blunt ¿Qué? can sound abrupt in Spanish. The neutral repair is ¿Cómo? or ¿Perdón?

A phone call, with the learner using three of them and never leaving a silence.

Recepcionista: Consulta del doctor Ferrán, buenos días.

Cliente: Buenos días. Llamaba para pedir cita.

Recepcionista: Muy bien. ¿Tiene el volante del médico de cabecera?

Cliente: Perdone, ¿qué significa volante?

Recepcionista: Es el papel que le da su médico para que le vea un especialista.

Cliente: Ah, vale. Sí, lo tengo. ¿Podría hablar un poco más despacio, por favor? Es que estoy aprendiendo español.

Recepcionista: Claro que sí. ¿Le viene bien el martes a las cinco?

Cliente: O sea, que el martes que viene, ¿no? Perfecto.

In English: Doctor Ferrán's surgery, good morning. Good morning, I was calling to make an appointment. Very good. Do you have the referral from your GP? Sorry, what does volante mean? It is the paper your doctor gives you so that a specialist can see you. Ah, right. Yes, I have it. Could you speak a little more slowly, please? I am learning Spanish. Of course. Does Tuesday at five suit you? So that is next Tuesday, is it? Perfect.

Notice the receptionist's explanation: el papel que le da su médico para que le vea un especialista. A relative clause and para que with the subjunctive, produced at speed by somebody who is not thinking about grammar at all. That is what the last five lessons have been building towards.

Notice also Es que..., which means the thing is, and is the single most useful phrase in spoken Spanish for introducing an explanation or an excuse.

Move three: keep a story going past one sentence

Ask a second-year learner what they did at the weekend and you usually get one sentence, a pause, and a change of subject. The grammar is not missing: they can build a preterite. What is missing is the spine that holds several sentences together.

Here is one story with the spine in place. Every verb is grammar from Modules 1 and 2.

Pues nada, el sábado pasado quedé con Marta para ir al cine. Habíamos comprado las entradas por internet una semana antes, así que estábamos tranquilos. Primero fuimos a tomar algo, porque todavía era temprano. Luego, cuando llegamos al cine, resulta que la sala estaba cerrada. De repente apareció un chico y nos dijo que habían cancelado la sesión. Total, que nos quedamos en la calle con dos entradas inútiles. Entonces Marta propuso que fuéramos a su casa a verla en el ordenador. Al final vimos otra película completamente distinta y nos reímos muchísimo. La verdad es que salió mejor así.

In English: So, last Saturday I arranged to meet Marta to go to the cinema. We had bought the tickets online a week before, so we were relaxed. First we went for a drink, because it was still early. Then, when we got to the cinema, it turned out the screen was closed. Suddenly a young man appeared and told us they had cancelled the showing. Anyway, there we were in the street with two useless tickets. So then Marta suggested we go to her place and watch it on the computer. In the end we watched a completely different film and laughed a great deal. The truth is it turned out better that way.

Read the verbs: quedé, fuimos, llegamos, apareció, dijo, nos quedamos, propuso, vimos, nos reímos are preterites carrying the events. Estábamos, era, estaba are imperfects holding the scenery. Habíamos comprado and habían cancelado are pluscuamperfectos putting two things further back. Propuso que fuéramos is a past main clause over an imperfect subjunctive, straight out of the table in Lesson 7. Nine sentences, and nothing in them is new.

Move four: give an opinion and then hold it up

An opinion with nothing behind it ends the conversation as surely as a missing word. The pattern to practise is: state it, support it, concede something, restate it.

Two students, on mobile phones in school.

Nerea: Yo creo que deberían prohibir los móviles en clase.

Dani: ¿Prohibirlos del todo? No me parece que sea la solución.

Nerea: Desde mi punto de vista, sí. Por ejemplo, en mi clase el año pasado había gente mirando el móvil cada cinco minutos. Y cuando el profesor los recogió al principio de la hora, todo el mundo trabajó mejor.

Dani: Estoy de acuerdo hasta cierto punto. Por un lado, distraen muchísimo. Por otro lado, a veces los necesitamos para buscar información o para avisar en casa.

Nerea: Ya, pero eso se puede hacer con el ordenador del aula. Aunque entiendo que no siempre haya uno libre, sigo pensando que la clase funciona mejor sin móviles.

In English: I think they should ban phones in class. Ban them completely? I do not think that is the solution. From my point of view, yes. For example, in my class last year there were people looking at their phones every five minutes. And when the teacher collected them at the start of the lesson, everybody worked better. I agree up to a point. On the one hand, they are very distracting. On the other hand, sometimes we need them to look something up or to let people at home know. Right, but you can do that on the classroom computer. Although I understand that there is not always one free, I still think the class works better without phones.

Look at the moods. Creo que deberían is indicative; No me parece que sea is subjunctive; Aunque entiendo que no siempre haya uno libre is aunque conceding a possibility. That is Lessons 2 and 3 in an argument about phones.

The order of moves when you get stuck

1. Do not stop. Silence hands the whole problem to the other person.
2. Say es que or a ver to hold the floor for two seconds.
3. Try the word in another form: a different tense, a related noun, the opposite plus no.
4. Circumlocute: es una cosa que sirve para...
5. Ask outright: ¿cómo se dice...?

Practising step five is unglamorous and it is the one that transfers. If you can only ever do one thing in this lesson, learn ¿Cómo se dice... en español? and ¿Qué significa...? until they come out without thought.

Common misconceptions

• A good speaker never gropes for a word. Everyone does, in every language. What a good speaker does is keep talking while it happens.
• Asking someone to repeat is rude or shows weakness. It is the single most normal repair in conversation. What actually stops an exchange is nodding at something you did not understand and then being unable to answer the next question.
• An opinion is a sentence. At the Intermediate range an opinion is four sentences: the claim, an example, a concession, and the claim again. Without the middle two it is not a contribution.

What you now know

Four sets of moves, and all of them are fixed phrases rather than rules, because a rule is too slow to reach for mid-sentence. Circumlocution buys you any noun in the language: es una cosa que sirve para, es como un, se usa para. Clarification keeps the channel open: ¿cómo?, ¿qué significa?, ¿me lo puede explicar de otra manera?, o sea que. A narration needs a spine of connectors, pues nada, resulta que, de repente, total que, al final, laid over the preterite and imperfect you already own. An opinion needs support, a concession and a restatement. So what?: the pharmacy conversation failed for want of eight words, and those eight words are now in your possession. The finger was never the problem.

Sources

1. Kelm, O. (n.d.). Spanish Proficiency Exercises: video clips of native speakers performing proficiency tasks, arranged by level. University of Texas at Austin, COERLL. laits.utexas.edu
2. Bullock, B. E., and Toribio, A. J. (n.d.). Spanish Grammar in Context: a reference grammar with video examples from the Spanish in Texas collection. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. grammar.spanishintexas.org
3. Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. (n.d.). Spanish materials. University of Texas at Austin. coerll.utexas.edu
4. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (2012). ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012, Interpersonal Communication: Intermediate. ACTFL. (The ACTFL site redirects automated requests to its terms page, so this is cited unlinked.)

Two messages sent on the same Tuesday afternoon, both asking for the same thing: to sit an exam on a different day.

To a friend, by message: Oye, ¿tú sabes si se puede cambiar la fecha del examen? Es que ese día tengo médico. Dime algo.

To the school office, by email: Estimada señora Ruiz: Le escribo para solicitar el cambio de fecha del examen de Historia previsto para el 24 de octubre, ya que ese día tengo una cita médica. Le agradecería que me indicara si es posible realizarlo en otra fecha. Quedo a la espera de su respuesta. Atentamente, Lucía Fernández.

Both are correct Spanish. Send the first one to the office and you will be thought rude; send the second one to a friend and you will be thought strange. The difference between them is a small, closed set of choices, and this lesson works through all of them.

The two columns, side by side

Remember: the colon after the greeting is not optional and it is not a stylistic choice. Spanish writes Estimada señora Ruiz: where English writes Dear Mrs Ruiz, and the comma in that slot is the commonest single error an English speaker makes in Spanish correspondence.

The formulas, and what each is for

Opening. A formal Spanish email states its purpose in the first sentence. There is no equivalent of the English habit of opening with the weather or with I hope this finds you well.

• Le escribo para solicitar información sobre el curso de verano. I am writing to request information about the summer course.
• Me dirijo a usted para comunicarle que no podré asistir a la reunión. I am writing to inform you that I will not be able to attend the meeting.
• En respuesta a su correo del 3 de marzo, le confirmo que... In reply to your email of 3 March, I can confirm that...

The request. This is where Lesson 5 pays for itself. The courtesy forms are imperfect subjunctives and conditionals.

• Quisiera solicitar una plaza en el curso. I would like to apply for a place on the course. Quisiera, not quiero.
• Le agradecería que me enviara el formulario. I would be grateful if you could send me the form. Note the pattern: agradecería, a conditional, then que plus an imperfect subjunctive, because the main verb is in a past-shaped form.
• ¿Sería posible cambiar la fecha? Would it be possible to change the date? An infinitive, so no subjunctive is needed.
• Le ruego que confirme la recepción de este correo. I would ask you to confirm receipt of this email. Rogar takes a present subjunctive here because rogar is present.

Attachments and enclosures. Le adjunto mi currículum, I attach my CV. Adjunto le envío el justificante médico, I enclose the doctor's note. In print, Se adjunta la documentación solicitada, the requested documents are enclosed, with the passive se from Lesson 8.

Closing. Atentamente is safe everywhere and in every register above the informal. Un cordial saludo and Saludos cordiales are slightly warmer and very common in Spain. Cordialmente is frequent in Latin American business writing. Muy señor mío as a greeting and Le saluda atentamente as a closing belong to a very formal, rather dated peninsular register: you will read them in official letters and you do not need to write them.

Laying out a letter on paper

A printed or handwritten formal letter has a fixed order, and Spanish puts the place and date where English puts only the date.

1. The sender's name and address, top left, or a printed letterhead, the membrete.
2. The place and date, top right: Salamanca, 16 de septiembre de 2026.
3. The recipient's name, title and address, below that on the left.
4. The greeting, with its colon.
5. The body, in short paragraphs: why you are writing, the detail, what you are asking for.
6. The closing formula, the signature, and the name typed underneath.

Three things about that date line. The month is lower case: septiembre, never Septiembre. The word de appears twice, before the month and before the year. And the day takes no ordinal: 16 de septiembre, not 16.º.

Abbreviations you will meet: Sr. (señor), Sra. (señora), Srta. (señorita, now avoided in professional writing), D. and Dña. (don and doña, used with a first name), Ud. or Vd. (usted), Atte. (atentamente), c/ (calle), n.º (número).

A complete email, with its translation

Asunto: Solicitud de plaza en el curso de verano de julio

Estimada señora Ruiz:

Me dirijo a usted para solicitar una plaza en el curso intensivo de español que su centro organiza en el mes de julio. Actualmente estudio tercer curso de español en un instituto de Manchester y me gustaría pasar tres semanas en Salamanca.

Le agradecería que me indicara si quedan plazas disponibles y cuál es el plazo de inscripción. Quisiera saber también si el centro puede facilitar alojamiento con una familia, ya que es la opción que prefiero.

Le adjunto el certificado de mi instituto con mi nivel actual. Quedo a la espera de su respuesta y le agradezco de antemano su atención.

Atentamente,
Lucía Fernández Blanco

Subject: Application for a place on the July summer course. Dear Mrs Ruiz, I am writing to apply for a place on the intensive Spanish course your centre runs in July. I am currently in my third year of Spanish at a school in Manchester and I would like to spend three weeks in Salamanca. I would be grateful if you could tell me whether there are places left and what the deadline for enrolment is. I would also like to know whether the centre can arrange accommodation with a family, since that is the option I prefer. I attach the certificate from my school showing my current level. I look forward to your reply and thank you in advance for your attention. Yours sincerely, Lucía Fernández Blanco.

Count the grammar in it: agradecería que me indicara, a conditional over an imperfect subjunctive; si quedan plazas, an indirect question with si and the indicative; ya que es la opción que prefiero, a causal connector and a relative clause; le adjunto, an indirect object pronoun. Nothing in this email is above the level you reached in Module 2.

Four calques that give an English writer away

And one that is not a calque but a slip: starting with usted and drifting into tú halfway down. Once you have written Le escribo, every verb, pronoun and possessive in the message belongs to usted: le, su, usted, and third-person verb forms. A single te undoes the whole register.

Common misconceptions

• Estimado is the Spanish for Dear. It is the Spanish for the formal Dear. The affectionate Dear is Querido, and writing Querido to an office is a genuine error, not a softer choice.
• Formal Spanish means long sentences. It means usted, a set of fixed formulas and a clear structure. A formal email of five short sentences is better than one of two enormous ones.
• Atentamente is old-fashioned. It is the standard neutral closing across the Spanish-speaking world. What is dated is Muy señor mío, which you should recognise and need not write.

The takeaway

A formal Spanish email is a set of slots, and each has a short list of acceptable fillers. Estimado or Estimada plus the surname, then a colon. Usted from the first word to the last, with le, su and third-person verbs. A first sentence that says why you are writing. A request built on quisiera, le agradecería que plus an imperfect subjunctive, or ¿sería posible? plus an infinitive. A line saying you await a reply, then Atentamente and your full name. On paper, add the place and the date at the top right, with a lower-case month and de twice. Bottom line: the hardest thing in this lesson is not any individual formula but consistency, because one te in a message addressed to usted is more conspicuous than any vocabulary mistake you could make.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Carta, sections on the carta formal and on its parts: saludo, cuerpo, despedida, firma and membrete. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
2. Yepes, E. (n.d.). 56. El imperfecto del subjuntivo, including the courtesy uses of quisiera and the pattern agradecería que plus the past subjunctive. In Spanish Grammar Manual. Humanities LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
3. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2010). Ortografía de la lengua española, on the colon after the salutation of a letter and on the lower-case writing of month names. Espasa. (Cited unlinked because the RAE sites refuse automated requests.)
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 16 on courtesy uses of the subjunctive and the appendix on letter-writing forms. Hodder Education.

Here is a prompt of the kind that turns up in a third-year exam, and in the same form all over the Spanish-speaking world:

¿Deberían los institutos prohibir el uso del teléfono móvil durante la jornada escolar? Escribe un texto argumentativo de unas 300 palabras.

Should schools ban the use of mobile phones during the school day? Write an argumentative text of about 300 words.

Most students answer that by writing four paragraphs of opinions joined by y and pero. What follows is a procedure that produces something else, worked end to end, with the finished essay printed in full.

What an argumentative text is made of

A texto argumentativo has one job: to support a stated position with reasons. Spanish teaching describes it in three parts, and the middle one is where the marks are.

The part students leave out is the objection. An essay that never names the strongest argument against its own position reads as though the writer has not met one, and a marker can see that from across the room.

The connectors, sorted by what they do

Spanish linguists call these marcadores del discurso, and the classification used in Spanish schools divides them by function.

Four things about using them.

Punctuation. A connector standing at the head of a sentence is followed by a comma: Sin embargo, esa objeción no invalida la medida. Inside a sentence it sits between commas.

A pesar de and a pesar de que. With a noun or an infinitive, no que: a pesar del ruido, in spite of the noise; a pesar de saberlo, in spite of knowing it. With a full clause, que is obligatory: a pesar de que la norma sea general. The same pair works for antes de and antes de que from Lesson 3.

Mood after a concessive. Lesson 3 again. Aunque el móvil ayuda a veces states a fact; aunque el móvil ayude a veces concedes a possibility in order to set it aside. In an essay the subjunctive version is usually the one you want, because you are granting a point rather than agreeing with it.

Register. Written argument avoids starting a paragraph with pero, which belongs to speech; use sin embargo or no obstante. It also avoids repeating yo creo que. Alternatives: cabe señalar que, it should be noted that; conviene recordar que, it is worth remembering that; es innegable que, it is undeniable that, with the indicative; no es cierto que, it is not true that, with the subjunctive.

The procedure, in six steps

1. Read the prompt and underline the question word. Here it is ¿Deberían?, so the answer must be yes or no, not a description of mobile phones.
2. Write the thesis as one sentence before anything else. If you cannot, you do not yet have an essay.
3. List three reasons. Cross out the weakest.
4. Find something concrete for each of the two survivors: a date, a number, a rule, a scene you actually saw.
5. Write down the best argument against you, in its strongest form, and then your answer to it.
6. Draft in the order introducción, argumento uno, argumento dos, objeción y respuesta, conclusión, and only then go back and fit the connectors.

Step six is the one to insist on. Connectors inserted while drafting tend to be decorative; connectors fitted afterwards have to justify themselves against a structure that already exists.

The finished essay

¿Deberían los institutos prohibir el móvil durante la jornada escolar?

En septiembre de 2026 la Comisión Europea planteó prohibir las redes sociales a los menores de trece años y limitar sus cuentas hasta los quince. La medida reabrió un debate que en los institutos lleva años abierto: si el teléfono móvil debe quedarse fuera del aula. En mi opinión, el móvil debería guardarse durante toda la jornada escolar, y no solo durante las clases.

En primer lugar, el móvil compite con la clase por la atención, y no compite en igualdad de condiciones. Una notificación está diseñada para interrumpir; una explicación de sintaxis no lo está. Cuando en mi clase el profesor empezó a recoger los teléfonos al principio de la hora, el ruido de fondo desapareció en dos días y no volvió.

En segundo lugar, prohibirlo solo en clase no funciona. Si el aparato sigue en el bolsillo durante el recreo, la conversación del pasillo se convierte en una pantalla compartida. Por lo tanto, la única norma que cambie algo de verdad es la que cubra la jornada entera.

Ahora bien, existe un argumento serio en contra, y conviene decirlo con honestidad. Hay alumnos que necesitan el teléfono para avisar en casa, para consultar un horario de autobús o por motivos de salud. A pesar de que la norma sea general, debe prever excepciones claras y sin trámites humillantes.

Sin embargo, esa objeción no invalida la medida: la corrige. Un centro puede guardar los móviles y, al mismo tiempo, tener un teléfono disponible en secretaría y permitir excepciones documentadas. En cambio, dejar el aparato en el bolsillo de cada alumno no resuelve ningún problema y crea uno.

En conclusión, el móvil no es el enemigo del aprendizaje, pero sí es su competidor más eficaz. Una prohibición que abarque toda la jornada, con excepciones previstas, devuelve al aula algo que ningún profesor puede fabricar: el silencio suficiente para pensar.

The same essay in English

In September 2026 the European Commission proposed banning social media for under-thirteens and limiting the accounts of those up to fifteen. The move reopened a debate that has been running in schools for years: whether the mobile phone should stay outside the classroom. In my view the phone should be put away for the whole school day, and not only during lessons.

In the first place, the phone competes with the lesson for attention, and it does not compete on equal terms. A notification is designed to interrupt; an explanation of syntax is not. When the teacher in my class began collecting phones at the start of the hour, the background noise disappeared in two days and did not come back.

Secondly, banning it only in lessons does not work. If the device stays in a pocket through break, the conversation in the corridor turns into a shared screen. The only rule that really changes anything, therefore, is one that covers the whole day.

That said, there is a serious argument on the other side, and it deserves to be stated honestly. Some students need a phone to let people at home know, to check a bus timetable, or for health reasons. Even if the rule is a general one, it has to allow for clear exceptions with no humiliating paperwork.

However, that objection does not invalidate the measure; it corrects it. A school can collect phones and at the same time keep a telephone available in the office and allow documented exceptions. By contrast, leaving the device in every student's pocket solves no problem at all and creates one.

In conclusion, the phone is not the enemy of learning, but it is its most effective competitor. A ban covering the whole day, with exceptions built in, gives the classroom back something no teacher can manufacture: enough quiet to think in.

What the grammar is doing in there

• La única norma que cambie algo de verdad es la que cubra la jornada entera. Two subjunctives in adjective clauses, straight from Lesson 2: the rule is being specified, not pointed at.
• A pesar de que la norma sea general. A concessive with the subjunctive, granting the point rather than asserting it.
• Si el aparato sigue en el bolsillo, la conversación se convierte en una pantalla compartida. A type-one si clause from Lesson 6, both halves indicative, because this is a real and ordinary case.
• Una prohibición que abarque toda la jornada. Another adjective clause in the subjunctive, describing a rule that does not yet exist.
• El ruido de fondo desapareció en dos días y no volvió. Two preterites carrying a completed event, exactly as in Lesson 1.

Worth holding on to: not one construction in that essay is new. What is new is the shape: a thesis in the first paragraph, two supported arguments, an objection taken seriously, an answer to it, and a conclusion that says the same thing in different words.

The second run, with the prompt changed

Now a different question, and watch the structure change with it.

Compara las ventajas y los inconvenientes de estudiar en tu ciudad y de estudiar en el extranjero. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of studying in your own city and studying abroad.

This prompt does not ask for a position, so a thesis-and-defence structure fits it badly. Two structures fit it well.

With the point-by-point shape, the contrast connectors do the structural work in every paragraph: En cuanto al coste, estudiar en casa es claramente más barato. En cambio, estudiar fuera obliga a pagar alojamiento. As for cost, studying at home is clearly cheaper. Studying away, on the other hand, means paying for accommodation.

And the conclusion changes its job. In the first essay it restated a position. Here it has to give a criterion instead: En definitiva, la elección depende menos del dinero que de lo que cada estudiante quiera aprender fuera del aula. In short, the choice depends less on money than on what each student wants to learn outside the classroom. Note quiera: an adjective clause about something unspecified, in the subjunctive.

Common misconceptions

• More connectors make a better essay. A connector that is not doing structural work is padding, and a marker reads a chain of them as a substitute for an argument. Fit them last, and only where the logic turns.
• An argumentative essay should not mention the other side. The opposite. An essay with no objection in it reads as though the writer never found one.
• Pero and sin embargo are interchangeable. They mean the same thing and belong to different registers. Pero joins clauses inside a sentence; sin embargo opens a sentence in written argument, followed by a comma.

What to carry forward

Write the thesis first, in one sentence, before a word of the essay exists. Find two reasons with something concrete behind them, and state the strongest objection in its own best form rather than a weakened version you can knock down. Draft the five blocks in order, and only then fit the connectors, choosing them by function: ordering, adding, contrasting, conceding, causing, concluding. Watch the two details that mark a careful writer: the comma after a sentence-initial connector, and que with a pesar de and antes de when a full clause follows. If the prompt asks you to compare rather than to argue, change the shape to point by point and let the conclusion give a criterion instead of a verdict. The core of it: every sentence in the model essay was built from grammar you already had. The essay is not a new kind of Spanish. It is a new kind of plan.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Texto argumentativo, on the tesis, the cuerpo argumentativo and the conclusión. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Marcador del discurso, on the classification of connectors into aditivos, consecutivos and contraargumentativos following Portolés and Martín Zorraquino. Wikipedia en español. es.wikipedia.org
3. RTVE. (2026, 16 September). Bruselas plantea prohibir las redes sociales a los menores de 13 años y limitar sus cuentas hasta los 15. RTVE Noticias. rtve.es
4. Butt, J., and Benjamin, C. (2011). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (5th ed.), chapter 33 on conjunctions and discourse connectors. Hodder Education.