Work Unit Five: ¿Conoce usted historia?
As you may know if you have children, one of the words that youngsters master early in life is "no." Well, it's probably the same in Spanish, for no is also a common Spanish word.| 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.
4. Feel free to email the instructor, although answers to questions of interest to others in the class will probably be posted on the board rather than be sent individually. |
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But the no of Spanish is much more versatile than English's. As we will learn in this lesson, it can also be translated as "not" and be used as a general way of negating a statement.
Assignment
Complete the lesson on pages 41-51 of the textbook. As usual, start by reading the story through, checking the words in the glossary so you get an understanding of what it means.Also, review the pronunciation rules regarding accents on page xii. As you do the lesson, note two different purposes of a written accent: to indicate which syllable in a word is stressed, and to indicate that a word is being used as part of a question. There also is a third purpose, two distinguish between two words that are otherwise spelled alike (such as se, a pronoun, and sé, meaning "I know").
Be sure to complete the exercises. Although copyright rules and fairness to other students using this book prevent me from publishing all the answers, you can check the answer page to see an answer to the first question in each section to help get you started.
Background
I think you will find most of the concepts raised in this week's lesson fairly well explained in the next. So I'll point out a few concepts that come up in the story of today's lesson that aren't addressed by the textbook.The necessary accent: You will notice that the words used as part of questions — words such as quién, qué, cuándo, and cómo — all have written accents. In the case of these words, the accents aren't needed to help with pronunciation, but to alert the reader that a question is being asked. That may seem redundant, since questions are already written with question marks, but the accents are indeed required.
What isn't pointed out in the text is that the interrogative words can be used with approximately the same meaning in statements rather than questions. But in that case they don't have accents. For more on this subject, read the lesson on written Spanish.
Conjugation of ir: Note the sentence in the story, ¿Cuándo vas a aprender? It may interest you to know that vas is a form of ir, an extremely common verb meaning "to go." As is the case with most of the most common verbs, ir is highly irregular. In fact, it (along with ser, "to be") is probably the most irregular verb in Spanish. This chart shows how it is conjugated.
In this sentence, ir is used as a kind of a future tense. The sentence vas a aprender means "you are going to learn." One way of stating something will happen in the future is use the correct form of ir, followed by the word a, followed by the infinitive. For example, voy a decidir means "I am going to decide."
If you have any questions about these concepts, don't hesitate to ask on the bulletin board.
Pronunciation
Most Spanish words receive the stress on one of the last two syllables.
If a word ends in a consonant other an n or s, the stress
is on the last syllable. If a word ends in an n, s or a vowel,
the stress is on the next to last syllable, also known as the penultimate
syllable. These rules can be overridden by a written accent on the syllable
that has the stress. The spoken
supplement to this lesson further explains the concept.
Coming up:
In the next lesson, we will learn how to use the Spanish equivalents of "a," "an," and "some."
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