Picture this…
Mrs. Campos (fictitious Spanish teacher) stands up and says, "today, we're going to learn
the Imperfect Past Tense." Your eyes widen, your mouth quivers, your knees buckle and your
heart sinks. Why? Because the very thought of all this "grammar stuff"
runs against your very nature.
Think about it, how many of us today opened our mouth to speak and after uttering some words of great significance, thought, "wow, I sure am impressive, I just used a "Periphrastic Future." or.. "That was cool,
I just used a past unreal condition with an application of the Subjunctive Mood."
Let's
face it, the only thing that this will do for you as a learner is to confuse you.
Maybe you've already experienced this and you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Forget about "tenses" and "conjugations!"
Language isn't about tense, it's about time!
It's all about the expression of time. This is where the "The Power of Patterns" comes in.
Every sentence is made using a group of words, and placing those words into what I call a
"pattern." There are 15 different principal patterns in both Spanish and English. In other
words, there are primarily 15 different ways to use the same words, thus allowing you to
express 15 different things.
In fact, you can create equivalents and line these patterns up side by side in English
and Spanish. It's kind of an "x = y" scenario. That, by the way, is a very, very helpful
thing to do for new learners or people who have not mastered structure yet.
You just have to know how they exactly match up.
Here's how patterns work...
Take the words "to eat," "at," and "the restaurant." Now, I can use these same words to
express 15 different things. I can say, "I eat at the restaurant," "I am eating at the
restaurant," "I am going to eat at the restaurant," "I have been eating at the restaurant,"
"I was eating at the restaurant," "I was going to eat at the restaurant," and so on.
In other words there are 15 different ways to express TIME.
Here's an interesting observation. In both English and Spanish there are primarily 3 ways to talk about things in the future, 2 ways to talk about things in the present and 10 ways, yes count
'em, 10 ways to talk about the past. No wonder so many people live in the past, they have more options for expressing themselves. Actually, language tends to be evolutionary. In that people talk so much about their
past, we have invented many different ways to talk about our past. Too bad, don't you think?
Let's go back to the concept of putting words in patterns. When you can take any words and
put them into any of the 15 principle patterns, you can make sentences…lots of them!
When you can make sentences, you can string some together and make paragraphs, and if you
know how to pronounce, you can make verbal paragraphs, which means you can make conversations
with people. And, of course, when you're listening to native people speak they're only doing
the same thing; putting words into patterns.
Let's say that you have 2000 words that you can interchange in any way you want into
15 different patterns. How many sentences could you make? Take 2000 to the
power of 15.
That's 2000 times 2000 times 2000 times 2000 times 2000 times, etc.
That's BILLIONS of sentences, amigo. Learn to use the power of combination.
Learn to use words in patterns.
Think about the color wheel.
