College of Pension Actuaries

Learning a new language is exciting and fun. But there can be some aspects students find difficult when learning Spanish. This article explains one key aspect to grasping Spanish.

That key is understanding verb tenses, that is, you need to understand what they are in your own language in order to be able to translate them into another. Spanish has the same verb tenses as English, although the subjunctive is used far more in Spanish. But as for other tenses, both simple and compound, they are the same.

MEANINGS OF DIFFERENT TENSES

The seven simple tenses

(using the verb “to eat”, first person, as an example)

Present: I eat, I do eat, I am eating

Imperfect: I was eating, I ate, I used to eat

Preterite*: I ate, I did eat

Future: I shall eat, I will eat

Conditional: I would eat

Present Subjunctive: that I may eat

Imperfect Subjunctive: that I might eat

*Also known as the Simple Past or the Past Historic.

The seven compound tenses

All these tenses use the verb “Haber” + the past participle (p.p.) of your main verb

Perfect: I have eaten (present tense haber + p.p.)

Pluperfect: I had eaten (imperfect tense haber + p.p.)

Preterite Perfect: I had eaten (preterite tense haber + p.p.)

Future perfect: I shall have eaten, will have eaten (future tense haber + p.p.)

Conditional Perfect: I would have eaten (conditional tense haber + p.p.)

Perfect Subjunctive: that I may have eaten (present subjunctive haber + p.p.)

Pluperfect Subjunctive: that I might have eaten (imperfect subjunctive haber + p.p.)

“Haber”, meaning “to have”, is an auxiliary verb (or a “helping” verb). It is only used to form different tenses. The verb for “to have” in the sense of possession is “Tener”.

The cornerstone of any education initiative is to ensure that class time won’t be wasted on non-beneficial activities, such as simply showing a movie to pass the time. Over the years there has been no single method more widely misunderstood and grossly misused than using movies in the classroom. For some, the mere mention of the word “movie” in a classroom environment is a dirty word. For others, the act of showing a movie in class is simply viewed as un-acceptable behavior by a teacher. These reactions unfortunately deprive teachers of an important educational tool, the feature film.

In fact, every day in classrooms throughout the nation teachers are energizing their students, enriching their lesson plans, and getting better performance on assignments by occasionally using quality movies in the classroom. They do this in response to changes in society, attributed in part to technological innovations, that have rendered traditional teaching methods ineffective.

Today, electronic devices like portable computers, mobile smart phones, tablets and PDAs are ubiquitous. The new generation is often rightly referred to as the “screened-age.” And it is true that the majority of media and story-based content on the electronic devices that dominate our age is delivered through a screen, be it a movie screen, TV screen, computer screen or mobile phone screen. In every day use written text are being limited to the technical and the old-fashioned.

Thus, a problematic situation was created. The average ELA class is designed to analyze written works, not screened productions. At this point, the teacher is starting at a significant disadvantage because they are competing for the attention of a student against devices and stories designed to do just that by the very best minds in our society. This affects students’ motivation to pay attention in class. Who wants to learn about the literature of the past using the technology of the past? This is due to the fact that both the method of delivery and the material are of no significant relevance to the daily life of today’s student.