¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás? Mi escuela tiene una clase de español. I took this class for the first trimester of high school, and now that the trimester is over, I decided to do an overall review of all of the courses I take, describing the material and activities of the course before giving an overall conclusion on my thoughts on that course. I’ll do a series of these for every course that I take every trimester with one article for each course, and the first part will cover Spanish.
Spanish 1 was my first period this trimester. It was the first period of my high school career. I don’t know what I expected out of my first-ever high school class, but I don’t think this was it. As I walked into the class on the first day, my teacher shouted to every student entering, “Hola! Buenos Dias!” These are greetings in Spanish, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear that. I even replied with “Hola” that first day, but after taking a seat in the classroom, the teacher immediately dropped a bomb on not only me but everyone else.
She immediately began ranting about who knows what in Spanish. No one completely understood her. I just used the little bit of Spanish I already knew, some of the random words, and the slideshow to understand, but she was talking about everything. She could have said something like “Seventy-eight dogs pooped in this classroom” and no one would know. Or even Spanish swear words. No one here knew any Spanish, so she could’ve said something vulgar in Spanish and we wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t even until the 3rd day that she spoke a word of English to review the syllabus with us.
Now let’s talk a bit about the material. There’s quite a lot we covered, and we went from knowing nothing to being able to greet and say a few basic sentences in Spanish. We certainly haven’t gone far, but we do know the basics now. We started by learning all the really basic stuff, like just many ways to greet someone (Hola isn’t the only way), ask them how they are doing, and then tell them how you are doing. In case you’re wondering, here are a few ways to greet people, ask them how they are doing, and introduce yourself.
Greetings → Hola, Buenos dias, Buenas tardes, Buenas noches
How are you? —> Como estas?/Como estas usted?
I am doing well —> Yo estoy bien/ estoy bien
I am doing okay —> Yo estoy mas o menos/ estoy mas o menos
I am doing bad —> Yo estoy mal/ estoy mal
What’s your name? —> Como te llamas?
My name is —> Mi nombre es ____/Me llamo _____
There! If you ever go to a Spanish-speaking country, you know how to greet someone and tell them what your name is. After that, we learned some more basic words such as how the count (Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez), the colors (Rojo, naranja, amarillo, verde, azul, morado), and the months (enero, febrero, marcho, abril, mayo, junio, julio, agosto, septiembre, octobre, noviembre, deciembre).
Next, we started the process of learning how to conjugate verbs. Every verb in Spanish can be conjugated in many different ways and it’s based on who you are talking about/past and present tense. We didn’t learn about past/present/future tense in Spanish 1, but we did learn how to conjugate it based on who you are referring to. The first verb we learned about was the unique gustar verb, which most people use to say “I like”. So to say you like something, you would say “Me gusta _____” with the blanks being filled by whatever you like. So if you want to say “I like swimming”, you would say “Me gusta nadar” or “I like to travel” which would be conjugated by saying “Me gusta viajar”. Then we learned about the verbs ser and estar which both have the same meaning, “To be” and are used depending on what you are going to say about that person.
It was also around this time that we were introduced to the 6 part conjugation table, which organizes how to conjugate present tense verbs based on who you are addressing. Here is the present tense verb conjugation for ser.
| Yo soy (I am) | Nosotros somos (We are) |
|---|---|
| Tu eres (You are) | Vosotros sois (You are, only used in Spain) |
| El/Ella/Usted es (He/She is) | Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes son (They are) |
Basically, you change the verb based on the pronoun you use in the sentence. So if you wanted to say “I am ____” in Spanish, you would start with “Yo” which means “I” and then put in ser’s “Yo” Form which is “Soy”. Therefore, you get “Yo soy” which means “I am”, and from there you can just add whatever Spanish adjective you want.
After Ser and Estar we began to talk about verbs as a whole (most of the Spanish Verbs) and how to conjugate them on the tables. It’s pretty easy to get the hang of once you remember the system.
Okay, so let’s say that you want to say “I travel” in Spanish. The verb for this is “viajar”. So you would say “Yo” and then add the Yo form for viajar. To do this, you remove the last two letters from the original verb and replace it with an “o”. Removing the last two letters from viajar gives you just “viaj”, and once you add the “o” to that you get “viajo”. Put those two together and you end up with Yo viajo, which means “I travel”. That wasn’t so bad, right?
So how would you say, “I listen”? The verb is “Escuchar”. Conjugate that into “Escucho” and then put the two together to get the final answer of “Yo escucho” Now you try one!
How would you say, “I do”? The verb is “Hacer” which means to do.
Judging by the last few paragraphs, you probably ended up with the final answer of “Yo haco”. Good job! You understand the system of how to conjugate present tense verbs in Spanish. But you’re wrong if you said that! The real answer is Yo hago!
So the system I just showed you that conjugates present-tense verbs doesn’t apply to all verbs. It only applies to part of them, and there’s a whole other collection of verbs called Irregular Verbs which don’t conjugate using the regular system but just kind of go off randomly on their own. I don’t understand why they do this (it just confuses me more) so hopefully taking Spanish 2 next trimester will answer some of those questions.
Anyway, that wraps it up for the fairly interesting curriculum. Now let’s talk about some of the activities we did in class and my overall experience. There are a lot of ways my teacher was able to get the material into our heads.
Just like any other class, we had to do a lot of worksheets. Most of the worksheets were just fill-in-the-blanks with the right verb conjugation and we also had to fill some of them out by talking to each other in Spanish and learning about each other. We did this with just about every Spanish concept (the interactive speaking in Spanish) which quickly filled up my notebook. It was quite difficult to stay organized which wasn’t good because Spanish did notebook checks… those notebook checks ended up killing off a lot of points.
There were also a few “presentational” activities that we had to do. We had to make a rap song in Spanish once which was by far the most embarrassing part of the trimester (at least everyone else embarrassed themselves too) and the final exam for Spanish was a two-minute presentation where we talked about ourselves, our likes, our dislikes, and our families while trying to keep the consistent grammar. I was pretty nervous for my presentation but it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as the rap song and I just stood up straight and tried to keep my voice consistent.
Occasionally (Once every few weeks) our class would also head to the world language lab which I believe is shared by all the Spanish Classes in our school. The room is filled with computers that we’d use as well as headphones to communicate with people. Most of our speaking activities happened in this room, and we’d fill out our worksheets there as we talked to each other in Spanish about our lives. We’d also be given Google Docs worksheets to fill out which mostly just consisted of a few questions and videos, so overall they weren’t that bad.
The last activity that we did in class that I can remember is the occasional text that she would make us read and then answer questions on. We had a few assessments based on this which I was pretty good at.
So what do I think of this class overall? I think it’s pretty good. It was a bit demanding at times and there was certainly a lot of stuff to learn and remember but it wasn’t insanely fast-paced and I was able to absorb all the topics. This Spanish Class is good if you want to learn the basics. If you take this class and learn, by the end of the three months you should be able to greet, introduce yourself, and say some basic phrases.
This class overall is very useful because it unlocks communication with so many people. It is fairly difficult because there is quite a bit to absorb, but if you’re paying attention and actively trying to get through things, it shouldn’t be so bad.