Post: Week 7, Day 1, Friday, October 10, 2008

Today we worked on some tricky parts of the "ballena mapuche" reading. Specifically, we talked about some strategies for studying.

A. Tenses you should focus on.

(I realize that you are given a whirlwind tour of all tenses, but some are more important than others). The four big ones you should know cold are:

Present, preterite, imperfect, and present perfect. About 95% of what you read will include those.

B. Irregular forms you should focus on.

(You should be able to recognize the irregular stems of these cold -- in the four tenses given above): ir, ser, estar, querer, tener, decir, poner, venir.

Thus you should be able to look at a sentence such as:

The balleneros tuvieron un barco.

and recognized that "tuv" is the irregular preterite stem form of "tener" and that "ieron" means the third person plural (they). Thus this means "they (the balleneros) had."

C. We looked at the way the present participle is formed in Spanish. This translates as the -ing form of the verb.

- ar verbs: drop "r" and add "ando." Hablar>>> hablando
- ir/er verbs; drop "ir" or "er" and add "iendo." Comer >>> comiendo; salir >>> saliendo.

NOTE: It is really common for students to confuse the PAST participle form of the verb (ado/ido) with the present participle form of the verb (ando/iendo). Be careful! "Hablado" and "hablando" look a lot alike!

D. We talked about common prepositions. Here are some you need to commit to memory:

a: to/at/in
por: by/for
de: from/of
con: with
sin: without
en: in/on/at

This is a non-exclusive list, but you should have these general senses in mind.

Then we did a bit of translation. One sentence that gave a lot of people problems was the one with this clause in in:

Es un combate mortal . . . el que enfrenta cara a cara en alta mar a la enorme ballena con sus cazadores

This is one of those places where a really good dictionary -- the big one that we have recommended -- is invaluable. If you don't have such a dictionary, I suggest you get one.

For most people the problem starts with "el que" -- which is masculine and singular and means "which" -- and refers back to a masculine, singular noun "un combate." So "el que/combate" is the subject of "enfrenta." If you look up "enfrentar" in the Oxford, you will see that "enfrentar a alguien con algo" means "to bring someone face to face with" --- so in this case the "combate" brings the enormous whale ("a la enorme ballena") face to face with its hunters ("con sus cazadores). However, I note that this fine distinction is not made in the online Merriam Webster or in the pocket dictionary. Again, I'd strongly recommend that to do these translations, you get hold of a high quality dictionary and use that as needed --- the pocket and the online work about 95% of the time but 5% of the time you do need to work with something more advanced.