Want to learn a language, but hate Grammar? Spanish Grammar made easy!
Grammar Rules! OK?
The Demystification of Grammar.
The word ‘grammar’ often conjures up negative visions of eerie Latin masters sweeping along cold school corridors in bat-like togas, cane at the ready, eagerly seeking out with beady eyes misbehaving school-children, on whom they can dole out 500 lines in after-school detention. If that is your case, then weep no more! Read on to learn that really you can’t live without grammar ….and that you already know huge amounts of grammar, subconsciously and how you use it constantly, all the time, everyday.
Many of us struggle with the grammatical concepts involved in learning a foreign language, simply because language teachers can mistakenly assume their students understand the meaning of grammatical terms, when that is not the case. Perhaps in our school days grammar was not taught as such and we were more encouraged to produce creative or descriptive writing in English classes. 30 years ago, (for us who can remember so far back!) the formal teaching of English grammar was not so in vogue in the British Education system and so many of a certain generation have missed out on formal grammar, even in outr own language.
Don't be scared of verbs; we couldn't live without them!
The verb is considered one of the most important parts of a sentence (all true sentences must have a verb!) yet the whole concept of learning verbs, tenses seems to sound off-putting. Some try desperately to manage in another language without understanding verbs (action words) and depend on ‘nouns’ (names of things) for too long. This will inevitably lead to acute frustration, apart from the obvious misunderstandings that are bound to be incurred.
Imagine how dull...
Imagine how dull life would be without verbs. It doesn't bear thinking about.
There would be no action in our speech; no comings or goings, no doings or havings, no startings or stoppings. How could we ever make sense of anything like that and how absolutely boring.
There is nothing for it but to accept the sweet little word "verb" into our language-learning life. In the end, the verb, which at first you may have shunned, wanted to ignore, pleaded with to go away, could turn out to be your best ally, in the challenge you have set yourself to master a second language!
General Spanish grammar
A little vocabulary to get started
Perhaps you already know a few ‘lexical items’ (words!) in Spanish but here are a few nouns (names of things) to get you started if not:
agua (water) amigo (friend) cerveza (beer) vino (wine) siesta (siesta!) mañana (tomorrow) por favor (please) gracias (thank you) dinero (money) banco (bank) farmacia (chemist) pan (bread) aeropuerto (airport) taxi (taxi!) español (Spanish) inglés (English)
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How do you feel about grammar in language learning?
Action! The Verb as suerglue!
In fact you may feel you are approaching fluency, armed with these twelve important words however, if you do not understand the use of the ‘verb’ (the action word) then how can you string the sentence together to give some meaning and perhaps even some extra meaning to what you are saying?
Verbs are ‘action’ words and by changing the verb slightly, they tell us WHO is doing the action! They also tell us WHEN the action is happening, so imagine how much information can be inferred and transmitted. What meaningful, satisfying or even just useful conversation can be had without a verb in some form or other? People often get frustrated by limited communication abilities when they first learning and become quickly unmotivated by progress. This will lead to students prematurely giving up the task of learning a second language out of sheer boredom with the conversations they are able to have. You may be able to say ‘dinero’ and ‘banco’ and happily but what happens if you want to know where the nearest bank is but you left your cash-card in the hotel room and need to go back there first to collect it and only then will be able to physically go. I can imagine some helpful Spanish-speaker dragging a poor tourist off, against his will, but unable to explain the inconvenience, to the bank at the other end of the village (because he obviously wouldn’t be able to understand the directions). So what you really need is a verb!
Get It Right with Vigorous Verbs
Find out more about verbs
Follow this link to Spanish Grammar : Verbs for beginners (Part 2) for a clearer understanding of using verbs in Spanish.
Spanish beauty...in language and in form
Has This Helped?????
Please click here for the second part of : SPANISH GRAMMAR: PRESENT TENSE (Part Two) TO FIND MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VERB IN LANGUAGE LEARNING.
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