Work Unit Eight: Así es la vida
People speaking English as a native language usually don't think much about verb conjugation — partly because verbs in English don't change very much depending on their usage, and partly because they don't nned to think about it. But verb conjugation can become on of the major challenges of learning Spanish.| 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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We've already learned how to conjugate regular verbs in Spanish. This week we start tackling the irregular ones.
Assignment
Complete the lesson on pages 81-89 of the textbook. Be sure not to simply gloss over the irregular verbs in the lesson, for these are the verbs you will be using time and time again.You also can hear a portion of the story by listening to the spoken supplement to this lesson.
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. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on the bulletin board.
Background
If if seems to you like the verbs in this lesson that are irregular are also some of the most common verbs, you aren't mistaken. And if you think about it, you may realize that the same is true in English. "Went" is the past tense of "to go," for example, and "am" and "were" are both forms of "to be." These verbs change most from the regular pattern over the centuries simply becauswe of their use — verbs that are rarely used are unlikely to be irregular (unless they have a common verb as a root word, just as in English "to forget" follows the same conjugation form as "to get."Although we aren't studying them in this lesson, the verbs that are the most irregular are the major workhorses of the language — verbs that are equivalent to English verbs such as "to be" and "to go." The only way to learn verbs such as those is to memorize them or get to know them through use, for in some cases there is no local pattern (just as there is seemingly no reason by "went" and "go" should be forms of the same verb). There are also verbs we might call "regular irregular verbs," verbs that irregular in a pattern that is shared by numerous other irregular verbs. We will also study those in a later lesson.
Vocabulary pointer: If you want to take a break from verb conjugations, look carefully at the words in this lesson's dialogue and see how many are similar to English words. Such words are known as cognates, and by far the majority of them came to English by way of Latin. One of the exceptions in the lesson is algebra, which obviously means "algebra." That word, as well as a few others that begin in "al," came to English and Spanish by way of Arabic.
Some words that may not look like they related to English words are. For example, tengo in this lesson is a form of the verb tener. There's no English cognate, but there are English words that come from the same root, such as "pertain," "sustain," and "contain." In Spanish, the corresponding verbs are pertener, sostener and contener, and they all follow the conjugation pattern of tener.
Coming up:
In the next lesson, we will study some irregular verbs.
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