Complete Spanish All-In-One

653 Pages·2018·40.87 MB·English

by  Gilda Nissenberg

PRACTICE
MAKES
PERFECT

Complete
Spanish
All-in-One

®

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PRACTICE
MAKES
PERFECT

Complete
Spanish
All-in-One

®

Premium Second Edition

Gilda Nissenberg, PhD, Editor

New York Chicago San Francisco Athens London Madrid
Mexico City Milan New Delhi Singapore Sydney Toronto

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Copyright © 2018 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright
Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data-
base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-26-012106-3
MHID: 1-26-012106-2

The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN: 978-1-26-012105-6,
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Portions of this book were previously published under the titles of Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar,
Practice Makes Perfect: French Nouns and Their Genders Up Close, Practice Makes Perfect: French Problem Solver,
Practice Makes Perfect: French Pronouns and Prepositions, Practice Makes Perfect: French Verb Tenses, Practice Makes
Perfect: French Vocabulary, and Practice Makes Perfect: French Sentence Builder.

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v

Preface vii

1 Spelling, pronunciation, and punctuation 1

2 Subject pronouns and the present tense 16

3 Present tense irregular verbs 35

4 The near future, nouns, and articles 46

5 Gustar, ser, and estar and expressing opinions 66

6 Adjectives, adverbs, and comparisons 95

7 The preterit tense 126

8 The progressive tenses 140

9 Questions, answers, and exclamations 147

10 The imperfect tense 166

11 Reflexive verbs and reflexive pronouns 180

12 Direct and indirect object pronouns, commands,

and double object pronouns 196

13 Demonstrative and possessive adjectives and

pronouns 235

14 The future tense 263

15 Prepositions, phrases, and conjunctions 270

Contents

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vi
Contents

16 The conditional tense 328

17 The present perfect and past perfect tenses 336

18 The passive voice 347

19 The present subjunctive 356

20 Indefinite and negative words and expressions 390

21 The imperfect subjunctive 406

22 Relative pronouns 433

23 Numbers 442

24 More writing 460

25 More conversations 475

26 Problem solver 541

Verb tables 575

Spanish-English glossary 583

English-Spanish glossary 597

Answer key 611

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vii

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish All-in-One, aimed especially at self-
taught learners, is designed to provide a user-friendly way to study at different
levels. All language needs are covered, including vocabulary, conversation, pro-
nunciation, and information about grammar, syntax, and spelling.

This book contains numerous ideas from the following five Practice Makes
Perfect titles:

◆ Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Problem Solver tackles many challenges
for Spanish learners, including when to use confusing verbs pairs such as
ser and estar, how to use double object pronouns, and how to spell words
and enunciate properly in Spanish.
◆ Practice Makes Perfect: Intermediate Spanish Grammar provides clear
explanations of verbs and tenses, such as how to conjugate present tense
irregular verbs and how to use gustar. Numerous examples and exercises
help users continue building competency to communicate in Spanish.
◆ Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Conversation includes vocabulary for
informal conversation and example dialogues with questions and
responses. Expressions that do not always translate literally, such as bueno
(well) and Parece mentira (It doesn’t seem possible), are reviewed.
◆ Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish Grammar may not include every
grammatical rule but does provide a general overview of Spanish gram-
mar, including many examples and practice exercises.
◆ Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Sentence Builder covers the Spanish syn-
tax needed to build sentence structure, along with spelling, punctuation,
and many exercises.

Readers will gain more knowledge through informal Spanish conversation,
vocabulary, and writing practice to communicate clearly with Spanish speakers.
And new to this premium second edition, recordings of the answers to numerous
exercises are provided via the McGraw-Hill Education Language Lab app. This
streaming audio will help readers improve both listening and speaking skills.

Preface

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1

Spelling, pronunciation,
and punctuation

This chapter will show you how to reconcile written and spoken Spanish words so
you can understand and read them aloud with accuracy. Students are sometimes
confused about the rules and mechanics of writing in Spanish, which makes their
written work difficult to follow. Since pre-college education includes less and less
attention to grammatical issues, most students are adrift in misty confusion
because they don’t know how to name what they are confused about. This chapter,
therefore, also contains some observations about the parts of speech and a bit of
basic grammar terminology.

Correct punctuation and spelling are needed to communicate written mes-
sages effectively. Punctuation is an established system of standardized marks that
separate structural units (sentences, quotes, paragraphs, etc.) and clarify the
meaning of written language:

system of standardized marks  punctuation

Spanish and English conventions regarding punctuation are similar, but
they vary in detail. In writing, we must adhere to the punctuation rules specific to
a given language.

Sentences are based on their structures, word order, and punctuation. In this
unit we will review and expand details regarding punctuation, building sentences,
and building paragraphs.

one or more sentences dealing with one topic  paragraph

Accent marks and pronunciation

Spanish slowly emerged as a written language, consciously and clearly distinct
from Latin, during the late Middle Ages. There were no rules, no one to guide its
development. Most people were illiterate. English was in a similar condition when
it emerged from the amalgam of languages that contributed to its development.

In 1728, more than one hundred years after the death of Cervantes, the Royal
Academy of the Spanish Language was founded, and still exists today, to watch
over the language and safeguard its transmission to future generations. (English
has no such body, and this explains in part why there are so many differences in
spelling throughout the English-speaking world.)

Some of the important features of Spanish spelling, known more formally as
orthography, are that the Academy eventually dropped double consonants, such
as ss and tt and simplified ph to f and th to t. Words with a cc in the middle are not

·1·

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practice makes perfect Complete Spanish All-in-One

considered a consonant pair because the first c ends the previous syllable and the second c begins
the next, such as in diccionario. The famous double or trilled rr, as in perro (dog) as opposed to
pero (but), actually represents a different sound and can be considered as if it were one letter. The
good news here is that many English words are cognates with Spanish and only require you to
understand a handful of rules in order to spell—and thus pronounce—them correctly. One
example is sufficient to make this point. The English word commission is comi sión in Spanish.

The only other small detail in this example has to do with the use of written accent marks.
Over time, the Academy established more and more conservative rules about accent marks. There
are four rules, and they can actually help you learn to pronounce words even if you’ve never seen
or heard them before. Here’s how the system works:

◆ Observing that a vast number of the words in Spanish end in a vowel, an -n, or an -s, and
that these words are almost always pronounced by stressing the next-to-the-last syllable,
the Royal Academy economically ruled that such words would not bear a written accent.
What this means to you, as a learner of Spanish, is that when you see a word of more than
one syllable, with no written accent and that ends in a vowel, an -n, or an -s, you should
immediately know to pronounce it with the stress on the next-to-the-last syllable. It really
is that simple. Open any dictionary, or diccionario.
◆ The Academy also noticed that the second largest number of words in Spanish end in a
consonant other than -n or -s and that they are pronounced with the stress on the last
syllable. They decided that these words also would not bear a written accent. All infini-
tives are examples of such words, as are all those ending in -dad or -tud (which are also,
by the way, all feminine in gender). Other common examples include animal, stressed on
the final -a, and reloj, stressed on the final -o.
◆ The next observation of the Royal Academy results in the third rule and is very impor-
tant: all exceptions to the first two rules will be marked by a written accent. Remember,
the exceptions are determined by how words are pronounced, speech being prior to any
written system. Thus, we have many, many words ending in -ión (almost all feminine),
such as comisión and nación, as well as others such as fármaco, malévolo, and cónsul.
The point is, if you know these three rules and see a word in print, you should be able to
correctly put the stress on the proper syllable of a Spanish word, even if you’ve never seen
or heard the word before.
◆ The fourth and last rule about the use of written accents applies only to a means of distin-
guishing between two otherwise identical one-syllable words. These are known as mono-
syllabic homonyms, one-syllable words that sound alike but have different meanings.
Examples of contrastive pairs include tú (you) and tu (your), él (he) and el (the, masculine
singular) té (tea) and te (object pronoun corresponding to tú) sé (I know) and se (the
third-person object pronoun).

Finally, there is only one group of words that stand outside these rules and cause difficulty.
In English these words end in -cy and in Spanish they end in -ia or -ía. There is simply no way to
predict whether they will be stressed on the final i or on the next-to-the-last syllable. The best
strategy is to look them up—and pay attention as you read. Examples include farmacia, malicia,
farmacología, and alevosía. You’re in luck, of course, if you first encounter such words in print,
since the presence or lack of a written accent will tell you where to place the stress when pro-
nouncing them.

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Spelling, pronunciation, and punctuation 3

Pronunciation

A couple of general remarks may help you improve your Spanish pronunciation and make it
closer to that of native speakers. First, vowels are pure. That means, for instance, that the (Ameri-
can) English vowel sounds as heard in cat, set, sit, on, and up are not found in Spanish—ever!
Instead, the Spanish pronunciation of these vowels is more like those heard in the following
(American) English words:

a father
e weigh
i seen
o woe
u moon

It only takes a slight adjustment to these to get them right: The sound of the e should not glide up
into the i sound in weigh or the y sound in they. Likewise, the pronunciation of u in Spanish, rep-
resented approximately by the oo in moon, should not glide into an ee sound at the end or glide
from it at the beginning, as is sometimes heard in some dialects of U.S. English. I’ve heard this
phenomenon most often in Western states, particularly in Southern California. Even Ronald
Reagan’s pronunciation had a touch of this!

Regarding consonants, the best advice I can give you here is to soften them. English speakers
everywhere tend to explode the pronunciation of initial occlusive consonants in particular,
such as are heard in Carl, Tom, and Peter. One way to practice this is to hold the back of your
hand about an inch away from the your lips and practice saying these names in a normal
volume and pitch, but without so much force, so that you no longer feel your breath on the
back of your hand.

The next and last bit of guidance I offer about pronunciation is to listen and read much. But
to whom should you listen and what should you read? The choice is yours, of course, but my
advice is to remember that you will be judged by how you speak—in socio-economic and class
terms. True, your Spanish-speaking listeners will realize that you are not a native speaker, but
they will judge you anyway, because the way you speak will suggest to them the sort of company
you keep. As the Spanish proverb goes: Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres. (Literally,
Tell me with who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are.) For speech models, I often sug-
gest that learners judiciously follow a character from a telenovela (soap opera) who is about their
age and gender and who represents a respectable character. I’ve known more than one native
speaker of Spanish who vastly improved his or her English by doing the same thing with Ameri-
can “soaps.”

The one remaining question I often hear from forward-looking learners who may have
specific career goals that could lead them in specific geographical directions is which dialect
of Spanish they should emulate. Depending on how you define them, in simple, practical terms
there are six or seven major dialectical regions in the Spanish-speaking world. Each, of course,
can be further subdivided, but for my readers, as learners of Spanish, the contours I shall pres-
ent will enable you to make some informed decisions about the dialect you select as your
model.

In Spain, there are those who pronounce the letter z and the consonant-vowel combina-
tions ce-/ci- as the th sound of the English word thin (often called theta, after the name of the
Greek letter). There are others who do not follow this pattern and who pronounce these sounds

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practice makes perfect Complete Spanish All-in-One

approximately as an s. The dividing line is roughly north-south, the north being the zone of
the theta pronunciation. The ancestors of most of the people of the New World were from the
south of Spain, which largely explains why the pronunciation of Castile is not found in the
Americas.

In the Americas, the major dialect groups are: Mexican, Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican
Republic, Puerto Rico and coastal areas of Central America, Colombia and Venezuela), Central
American (except Caribbean coastal areas), Andean (interior of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, most
of Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay), and finally the area known as the Cono del Sur or Southern
Cone (Argentina, southern Chile, and Uruguay).

Spanish in the United States itself is evolving. In South Florida, New York, and New Jersey,
you will find mostly Caribbean dialects. In Chicago, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and other Mid-
western cities, as well as in most of the Western states, the Mexican dialect predominates.
Interestingly, in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C., the Salvadoran dialect predomi-
nates, due to the presence of more than a hundred thousand immigrants who fled El Salvador
in the 1980s.

No one dialect is superior to another. The Royal Academy has corresponding members in
every corner of the world where Spanish is or ever has been a language of government. There are
educated and non-educated speakers in each dialect, so if you have professional reasons for
spending much time in any particular region, you should seek out people of your profession who
are from there so you can fit in as easily as possible. This book, therefore, takes a neutral approach
in its choice of vocabulary, a sort of airport dialect, if you wish.

The brief set of exercises that follow give practice in the use of the dictionary—to check
spellings, accent marks, and proper classification according to part of speech. It is assumed that
learners will also be pronouncing the words they find.

1·1

EJERCICIO

Indicate whether the following words correctly use accent marks or do not require one
according to the following key: correctly used; incorrectly placed (but needed on a
different syllable); correct, with no accent mark; superfluous (placed on syllable that
would be stressed anyway); or missing.

1. organizacion

2. consul

3. lealtad

4. animál

5. camión

6. tecnologia

7. háblas

8. teorico

9. temeraria

10. primorosa

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Spelling, pronunciation, and punctuation 5

11. caracter

12. avíon

13. caracteres

14. vendio

15. ventána

16. vecino

17. frijoles

18. proyector

19. cortinas

20. teoría

Punctuation marks

The following punctuation marks are used in both Spanish and English sentences:

la coma
comma
las comillas
quotation marks
dos puntos
colon
el paréntesis
parenthesis
el punto y coma
semicolon
el punto
period
el signo de admiración
exclamation point
el signo de exclamación
exclamation point
el signo de interrogación
question mark

The period

Use a period (.) to indicate the end of a declarative sentence (a sentence that makes a statement),
an indirect question, or a command (imperative) sentence:

Pablo sabe la verdad.
Pablo knows the truth.
Ana no sabe quién toca a la puerta.
Ana does not know who is knocking at

the door.
Firmen la carta antes de enviarla.
Sign the letter before you mail it.

A period separates sentences in a paragraph structure. The first letter of the word that fol-
lows a period is capitalized:

Esta noche vamos a observar un eclipse
Tonight we will watch a lunar eclipse. The
lunar. Los telescopios están listos.

telescopes are ready. The members of the
Los miembros del equipo nos enviarán

team will send us the details.
los detalles.

Note that in typing or keying in text, you should leave a single space between a period and a
new sentence. When you write paragraphs that are part of a longer piece, indent the first sentence
or line of each paragraph:

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practice makes perfect Complete Spanish All-in-One

El gobernador del Estado de Aragua

The governor of the State of Aragua will
pronunciará un discurso acerca de las
give a speech about the needs of the citizens.
necesidades de los ciudadanos. Dos de
Two of his advisors told him about the concerns
sus consejeros le comunicaron las
of some of his fellow citizens.
preocupaciones de algunos de sus
compatriotas.

Abbreviations

Periods are also used in abbreviations and some acronyms (siglas). Not all abbreviations have
equivalents in both English and Spanish. Some abbreviations have been used for a very long time,
while others have or may become obsolete, falling out of favor for various reasons. Here are some
frequently used abbreviations in Spanish:

a. de J.C.
b.c.
a.C.
b.c.
d.C.
a.d.
Dr.
Dr.
Dra.
Dr.
Drs.
Drs.
etc.
etc.
ONU
UN
pág.
p. (page)
P.D.
P.S.
S.A.
Inc.
Sr.
Mr.
Sra.
Mrs.
Srta.
Miss
FUNDÉU (La Fundación del
Español Urgente)
UE
EU (European Union)
EE.UU.
US or U.S.
JJ.OO. (Juegos olímpicos)
Olympic Games

In Spanish, note the repetition of the initial letters of each component of abbreviations that con-
sist of plural nouns such as EE.UU. Also, note that FUNDÉU has an accent mark to indicate the
stressed syllable.

Encontraron evidencias de una civilización
They found evidence of a civilization dated
de alrededor del año 200 a. de J.C.

around 200 b.c.
La petición va dirigida al Dr. E. Santos.
The petition is addressed to Dr .E. Santos.
El Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU tiene
The UN Security Council has an emergency
una sesión de emergencia.

meeting.
La abreviatura P.D. viene de la frase latina
The abbreviation P.S. comes from the Latin
“postdata”.

phrase “postscriptum.”
Los EE.UU ganaron más medallas en los
The US won more medals in the 2008 Olympic
JJ.OO. de 2008.

Games.

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