La Ciudad: The City
¡Buenos días! Good morning! Or is it buenas tardes (good afternoon) or buenas noches (good afternoon) for you? Whatever time of day it is, I hope you're enjoying these preliminary lessons in Spanish. Although these initial lessons are quite basic, they form the basis for starting to study verbs and seeing how words relate to each other.| Read, listen and learn in the About.com
virtual Spanish classroom:
1. You're free to join the class at any time and study on your own schedule. For textbook and other organizational information, see the class introduction. 2. Listen to a brief spoken version of this lesson, which includes the pronunciation of many of the words in the text. With most computer configurations, clicking on the above link will download and/or play an MP3 sound file. If you need software for playing MP3 files, see the About.com MP3 Music site. The sound file (343 KB) may take several minutes to download unless you have a high-speed connection. 3. To ask questions, the best way is to post them on the About.com Spanish Language bulletin board. 4. Feel free to email the instructor, although answers to questions of interest to others in the class will probably be posted on the bulletin board rather than be sent individually. |
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As I pointed out last time, these lessons are introducing new material slowly. So if you haven't purchased the textbook yet, you'll have time to catch up once you receive it. These initial lessons merely introduce some basic concepts; we'll go over the concepts again in a few weeks.
Assignment
Again, review the pronunciation guide on pages xi-xii. This time, pay extra attention to the note at the end concerning accents.Next, complete Preparatory Lesson 3 on pages xviii and xix of the textbook. Although the vocabulary is new, the basic grammar used is mostly a review.
Finally, if you haven't done so already, take a look at the recent About.com lesson on gender exceptions. It isn't necessary for your to memorize the words in that lesson; just see which ones mentioned are part of the textbook lesson.
Background
Although the main purpose of this lesson is to review the singular articles (el, la, un, and una), the workbook also introduces a new type of word — the interrogatory pronoun. In this case, the words are qué, quién and dónde, used in a question to mean "what," "who" and "where." The lesson also shows that more than one Spanish word can be used to translate "is."Note that all three of those words have accent marks on them. Although you don't see the words used without the accents in this lesson, they are used that way when not in a question. In this case, the accents don't affect how the word is pronounced — they are just there to help the reader to know that they are being used in a question.
Also note that in exercises A and B that the word es is used to mean "is." But in the final exercise, the verb used is está.
That is because Spanish has two verbs meaning "to be," ser and estar. Es is a form of ser, and está is a form of estar, just as "is" is a form of "to be." It is important not to get the two verbs mixed up in Spanish, for they have different meanings. We will go into much more detail later, but suffice it to say if we're talking about what something is, we we use a form of ser such as es, but if we're talking about where something is, we use está or another form of estar.
A final note: The text notes that a car is called an un automóvil or un coche. But there is also another way to refer to a car — un carro. Also, many localities have different words for "bus," and a variety of words can be used to refer to a man, woman, boy, or girl. But all the words listed would be understood wherever you go.
Pronunciation tip
In Spanish, it is easy to tell which syllable of a word has the accent or stress. Generally, the accent is on the last syllable, except when the word ends in s, n, or a vowel, in which case the stress goes on the next-to-last syllable. The main exception is when an accent is placed over a vowel to indicate that the emphasis goes on that syllable. Pay attention to the audio lesson to see where the emphasis is placed on the words used in this lesson. The only exception to theses rules is with some words of foreign origin, but you won't come across them very often, and many of them are in English anyway.Coming up:
In the next lesson we'll start using the plural definite article and start using sentences with direct objects.
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