Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: Feel the Fear and ’Subjunctive’ Anyway

241 Pages·2015·1.65 MB·English

by  Gordon Smith-Durán

Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive.
Feel the fear and 'subjunctive' anyway.
Probably the most comprehensive 'Spanish Subjunctive' workbook on the
market.
Gordon Smith-Durán
Cynthia Smith-Durán
LightSpeed Spanish
2015
Copyright © 2015 by LightSpeed Spanish All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be
reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
First Printing: 2015 Edition 3
ISBN 978-1512073027
LightSpeed Spanish
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Las Dehesas,
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Dedication
To the many beautiful people who have helped this book to
come into being. A very special thanks goes to Michael Smith.
Were it not for the conversation we had together one day in
2014 this book would never have been written. (Or at least not
as quickly!) Your help, please.
We are self publishing authors which means that we have to
proof read our own books. No matter how much we check them,
we, inevitably, end up with the occasional typo or error.
If you were to spot any glaring errors as you work through this
book, please feel free to let us know at:
[email protected]
or contact us through our website: www.lightspeedspanish.co.uk
Acknowledgements
Quotation on p.36 taken from:
Butt, J, Benjamin, C. Grammar of Modern Spanish, 2004.
London. p 248
Contents
Where it all began.
Getting to the Spanish Subjunctive.
My first tentative steps.
I contracted ‘Subjunctivitus’.
My ‘light bulb’ moment.
So, how does that help us as adults?
Learning the triggers.
What this book won’t do.
A flowchart of your learning journey.
Shall we start?
The AR subjunctive structure.
The ER/IR subjunctive structure.
A handy metaphor to help you.
Wishes.
Esperar.
Opinions.
The extended trigger.
Obligations.
Super review.
Possibilities.
The non-triggers.
El hecho de que…
Subjunctivitus.
The thing about Quizás
The subtle triggers that catch us out.
Afterwards.
When is an afterwards trigger not a trigger?
The power of three.
Súper mega repaso.
The extended and the double trigger.
The present subjunctive with Haber.
Levels of learning.
The imperfect subjunctive.
Wishes.
Opinions.
Mixing the present and the past.
Obligations.
Possibilities.
Afterwards.
Repaso.
Using the perfect tense with the Imp Subj.
The famous If/Would structure.
If/Will in the past.
The conditional + que + Imp Subj.
The two jobs of Ojalá.
As if…
The weird and wonderful.
Time out to contemplate.
The last full review.
Answers to the exercises.
Index of verb conjugations.
Desmitificando el Subjuntivo español.
Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive.
Donde empezó todo-Where this all began.
As I begin to write this book in 2015 I can look back on the many fascinating
years that I have spent learning to understand, utilize and, to some smaller
degree, dominate the Spanish language. It hasn’t been an easy task, of that I
must admit. However, in many respects this experience has been the one that has
most fulfilled and altered the entire course of my life. (Para mejor, claro.)
If I were to consider all of the steps through which this process has taken me,
facing the task of learning the Spanish subjunctive was the only one that truly
struck fear into my very core. But, why? It may well have been because of its
worryingly long name, or because I didn’t know what the word ‘subjunctive’
meant, or maybe because my English language training at school had been so
‘light’ that I had been blissfully oblivious to the existence of the present and past
subjunctive. (I doubt my English teacher was aware of them either.)
And yet, thanks to two lovely people, I have become very much aware of how
we do use them in English, and of how they appear far more often than you
might imagine. We’ll come to the Imperfect, or what I prefer to call the Past
Subjunctive later, and then I’ll have the opportunity to talk about the other
person who has guided me no end in understanding this tricky tense (my wife,
Cynthia).
For the moment, however, let me show you how I learnt about the way the
Present Subjunctive is used in English.
During an email conversation with my good friend Peter Løvstrøm, my eyes
were opened to the vast number of sentences in English that take the Present
Subjunctive. Before that, I hadn’t really paid attention to these kind of word
structures and was thus unaware of the fact that they were identical in format to
the Spanish Present Subjunctive.
Here are a few examples that Peter offered me:
It is important that you be there.
(Rather than ‘that you are there.’)
It is necessary that he do it immediately.
(And not, ‘that he does it.’)
It is imperative that we be present at the meeting.
(Normally it would be, ‘that we are present.’)
It is advisable that she have some rest before the trip.
(Instead of, ‘that she has some rest.’)
I demand that I be allowed to speak to my lawyer.
(The normal conjugation is, ‘that I am allowed.’)
The doctor insists that the patient stay in the hospital.
(Rather than, ‘that the patient stays.’)
Now, I have to say that much of this kind language is falling into disuse. Lots of
people typically use the version that appears in brackets. Yet, as you read the
above sentences, you probably noticed how natural they all seemed. That’s
because it’s likely that, at some point, we’ve all heard them used.
As you can see, the system we use in English is to apply the verb in its infinitive
(complete) form. This is our subjunctive. We don’t make it agree with the person
mentioned in the sentence. Now, for me, discovering that was a real eye opener.
Beforehand I had always attributed our fear of the Spanish Present Subjunctive
to the fact that we didn’t have it in English and thus we had no frame of
reference for it. Wrong again! (I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been
wrong in my assumptions about things. Perhaps one day I’ll get stuff right on a
consistent basis…but I doubt it.)
Perhaps, had I known from the start that both the Present and the Past
(Imperfect) Subjunctive existed in English, I wouldn’t have been quite so
nervous.
Llegando al Subjuntivo español.
Getting to the Spanish Subjunctive.
So, even though for a long time I was unaware of the Present Subjunctive in
English, what was certain was that I was more than awakened to its existence in
Spanish.
During my learning journey up to that point I had already heard the mantra that
invariably comes from the more advanced students who, for whatever reason,
feel that it’s their duty to scare the pants off you.
They seemed to revel in offering me the foreboding warning of… “Wait until
you get to the subjunctive. You’re going to die!”.
Thanks to all those dire warnings, not only was I scared of the Subjunctive but
also I knew only too well that at some point I was going to have to face it head
on. However, probably like many of you reading this book, I hoped that I could
find a different way; some trick of language that would allow me to avoid it for
as long as possible, if not forever.
The more I studied, however, the more I realised that avoiding the subjunctive in
Spanish was akin to trying to speak Spanish without verbs, to talk without
moving your mouth or to breathe underwater. It just wasn’t happening. I was
going to have to do it ‘me gustara o no’. (Whether I liked it or not.)