Learning Spanish: How to Understand and Speak a New Language

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Literature & Language Language Learning

Learning Spanish

How to Understand and Speak a New Language

Course Workbook

Professor Bill Worden

The University of Alabama

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Bill Worden, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Spanish Director of Spanish Programs The University of Alabama

Dr. Bill Worden is an Associate Professor of Spanish and the Director of Spanish Programs in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at The University of Alabama. Dr. Worden received his A.B. in Mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1985 and subsequently taught high school Spanish for five years in Illinois and Massachusetts. After studying in both Vermont and Madrid, he received his M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College in 1996.

As a doctoral student at Brown University, Dr. Worden was awarded the David and Ruth Kossoff Prize for Leadership in Language Teaching by the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching by the Graduate School. He also was chosen by fellow graduate students to give the address at the Graduate School commencement ceremony. In 2002, Dr. Worden received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown.

Since 2002, Dr. Worden has taught a wide variety of courses at The University of Alabama, ranging from Introductory Spanish and Advanced Grammar and Composition to undergraduate and graduate courses in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish literature. He has directed doctoral dissertations on colonial Latin American literature, early modern Spanish literature, and 20th-century Latin American literature.

Dr. Worden's main area of research is the work of Miguel de Cervantes, especially his novel Don Quixote. Dr. Worden has published in the fields of early modern Spanish literature, colonial Cuban theater, and 19th-century Spanish literature. He also has published on pedagogical topics, including how to teach Spanish at the middle school and high school levels and how to help undergraduate students make connections to Don Quixote. In addition, Dr. Worden is an award-winning speaker who has lectured on such subjects as the prose of Cervantes, early modern Spanish poetry, and approaches for helping beginning language students become comfortable speaking Spanish.

For a number of years, Dr. Worden served The University of Alabama's Department of Modern Languages and Classics as the Director of the Spanish Language Program and was responsible for supervising all graduate teaching assistants and instructors of introductory- and intermediate-level Spanish courses. In 2013, the Alabama Association of Foreign Language Teachers selected Dr. Worden as the winner of the annual Outstanding Foreign Language Teacher Award for Postsecondary.

Dr. Laura Rojas-Arce, author of the workbook and coauthor of the speaking activities, grew up in Costa Rica, where she studied psychology as an undergraduate student at the Universidad Hispanoamericana in Heredia. She completed her doctoral studies with a focus on contemporary Central American literature and received her Ph.D. from The University of Alabama in 2013. Dr. Rojas-Arce is an Instructor of Spanish at The University of Alabama, where she teaches courses ranging from Introductory Spanish and Advanced Grammar and Composition to courses on Latin American literature.

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Table of Contents

Professor Biography i Scope 1 Workbook Introduction 2 Workbook Families 3

Lesson Guides LESSON 1 Introduction to the Spanish Language 4

LESSON 2 Definite Articles and Nouns 10

LESSON 3 Subject Pronouns and the Verb Ser 15

LESSON 4 Regular -ar Verbs in the Present 21

LESSON 5 Indefinite Articles and Numbers to 100 27

LESSON 6 The Verb Estar and Numbers over 100 33

LESSON 7 Regular -er and -ir Verbs in the Present 39

LESSON 8 The Verb Ir in the Present 46

LESSON 9 Expressing Time in Spanish 52

LESSON 10 Expressions Using the Verb Tener 59

LESSON 11 Verbs like Hacer and Interrogative Words 66

LESSON 12 The Verbs Saber and Conocer 72

LESSON 13 Stem-Changing Verbs 78

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Table of Contents

LESSON 14 Ver, Dar, and Other Irregular Verbs 83

LESSON 15 The Present Progressive 89

LESSON 16 Direct Object Pronouns and Adverbs 95

LESSON 17 Affirmatives, Negatives, and Demonstratives 101

LESSON 18 More Affirmative and Negative Expressions 106

LESSON 19 Indirect Object Pronouns111

LESSON 20 Double Object Pronouns 116

LESSON 21 Reflexive Verbs 122

LESSON 22 Talking about the Past: Acabar and Hace 128

LESSON 23 Talking about the Past: ?Desde Cu?ndo...? 133

LESSON 24 Formal Commands and Unequal Comparisons 138

LESSON 25 Informal Commands 142

LESSON 26 Superlatives and Equal Comparisons 149

LESSON 27 Regular -ar Verbs in the Preterite 153

LESSON 28 Regular -er and -ir Verbs in the Preterite 157

LESSON 29 Irregular Verbs in the Preterite 162

LESSON 30 Next Steps in Improving Your Spanish 166

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Learning Spanish: How to Understand and Speak a New Language

Supplemental Material Grammar Reference 172 Los glosarios / The Glossaries 178 Glosario por tema / Glossary by Topic 180 Glosario de cognados / Glossary of Cognates 196 Glosario espa?ol-ingl?s / Spanish-English Glossary 202 Glosario ingl?s-espa?ol / English-Spanish Glossary 219 Resources for Further Study 236 Photographic Credits 238

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Scope

This course introduces learners to the Spanish language and the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. Because the course is designed for learners with no previous experience with the language, the lessons begin with the building blocks of Spanish: the alphabet, the proper pronunciation of consonant and vowel sounds, and greetings and responses to greetings. As you move forward in the course, you will be introduced to a variety of fundamental grammar topics, ever-increasing vocabulary lists, and cultural information that will teach you about the countries in the world where Spanish is spoken and help you understand how to use the grammar and vocabulary you will learn about in their proper cultural context. The purpose of this course is not simply to teach you about Spanish, but rather to develop your language skills so that you can communicate successfully in the language. For that reason, the course includes a variety of components designed to allow you to practice and improve your abilities in reading, writing, speaking, and understanding spoken Spanish. This course exposes learners to a variety of cultural aspects in the Spanish-speaking world, both in the video lessons and in the Cultural Readings that are found in the workbook. In terms of the grammar and vocabulary presented in the 30 lessons, this course covers the equivalent of what is taught in a first-semester Spanish course in college. You will find extensive grammar and vocabulary information in the various sections of the workbook. In addition, you might wish to consult any standard introductory Spanish textbook for reference. Throughout the course, you will learn more than a thousand of the most commonly used words in Spanish and become acquainted with a number of important cultural aspects of the Spanish-speaking world. In terms of grammar, you will learn how to form the present tense of all verbs, as well as the present progressive construction, which is used to talk about something happening right now. You will be able to talk about future events in two different ways and to use several expressions that talk about past events. Moreover, you will learn how to conjugate and use one past tense--the preterite tense--for all verbs. Your ability to express yourself with verbs will be accompanied by a growing competence in using, for example, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs--all the necessary linguistic tools that will allow you to communicate successfully in Spanish. This course offers the requisite linguistic and cultural knowledge that will allow you to make the necessary first steps toward achieving communicative competence in Spanish.

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Workbook Introduction

Welcome to the workbook for Learning Spanish: How to Understand and Speak a New Language. The exercises included here are designed to help develop your reading and writing skills in Spanish while you practice the vocabulary and grammar presented in the lessons. This introduction briefly explains how this workbook fits in with the other components that accompany this course so that you'll know how best to make use of all of them to help develop your Spanish skills.

When you finish watching one of the 30 lessons, you should next listen to the audio glossary, which will give you the pronunciation and definition of all the new vocabulary words. Then, it will be time to practice what you've learned. The speaking activities that follow the audio glossary are designed to help you improve your listening and speaking skills, and the exercises in this workbook will allow you to practice your reading and writing skills. You can decide if you want to do the speaking activities before or after you do the workbook exercises, but you should do both of these only after watching the lesson and listening to the audio glossary. In addition to the exercises accompanying each lesson, you will find the Grammar Reference, Glossary by Topic, Glossary of Cognates, Spanish-English Glossary, EnglishSpanish Glossary, and Resources for Further Study at the end of the workbook.

Each section of this workbook begins with New Vocabulary, a listing of new words in the same order as they are presented in the audio glossary. Next, the General Review section summarizes the material covered in the lesson, allowing you to review grammatical, cultural, or vocabulary-related content. Then, you will find the Activities, which offer practice with the new grammar and vocabulary. At the end of every workbook section, you will find the Correct Answers, which will allow you to check your work. In addition to the Activities included after every lesson, this workbook also contains six Cultural Readings about different aspects of Latin American culture.

The Activities in this workbook are contextualized in a series of short stories dealing with several families and their friends and neighbors. These families live in Villa Celeste [Celestial Town], a neighborhood somewhere in Latin America. The principal characters in the stories are the Cort?s Ruiz family, the Quir?s Garc?a family, and the Gonz?lez Fallas family. The Cort?s Ruiz family has three sons, and the Quir?s Garc?a family has two daughters and a son. Those two families also have two very young granddaughters. The Gonz?lez Fallas family, who just recently moved to the neighborhood, has a son and a daughter. You will find the family trees for these families following this introduction.

Most of the words used in the Activities will be ones you will have already been introduced to in the course. When this is not the case, the workbook will give the English for the Spanish word. The six Cultural Readings do indeed include vocabulary and grammar you will have already seen in the course. But they also purposely include some material a bit beyond your current level of comprehension. This will force you to make some educated guesses while reading--a very useful skill for a language learner. You won't need to recognize every word or expression in a reading to gain a good understanding of it. The English translation for the Cultural Readings can be found after the Correct Answers, so you will be able to see how well your understood what you read.

And now, it's time to get to work. Or, as we would say in Spanish: ?A trabajar! [Let's work!].

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