I missed my Spanish lessons on Thursday and Friday of last week, so I have two additional hours to make up this week. As such, I am doing 1.5 hours a day Monday through Thursday. This will also give me the feel for longer classes in the future. An hour and a half really wasn’t too bad, so I may switch it up in a week or so. We seem to be able to cover much more material.
Today I continued working on imperatives and imperatives with encliticos/procliticos. We also went over negative imperatives as well as rhetorical questions (which are essentially imperatives, but take a different form).
Once we went over everything, I was given a subject, a verb, an object, and an indirect object. I then was asked to give these forms:
1. imperative
2. imperative with encliticos
3. imperative with procliticos
4. negative imperative
5. negative imperative with encliticos
6. negative imperative with procliticos
7. rhetorical form
8. rhetorical form with encliticos
9. rhetorical form with procliticos
As an example:
Tu / escribir / una carta / a ellos
Escribe una carta a ellos
Escribeles una carta
Escribesela
No escribas una carta a ellos
No les escribas una carta
No se la escribas.
Escibes una carta a ellos?
Les escribes una carta?
Se la escribes?
Negative rhetorical questions don’t seem to exist or are just not common. Something like, “won’t you be nice to me?”. That example makes me think rhetorical question is perhaps not the appropriate label, because that example may not be rhetorical. These are questions which are to be interpreted as commands, even though they are in the form of a question.
Repetition of grammatical rules has proven helpful. Especially in the above format. As I go through so many, I take less and less time to think about the rules and they tend to flow somewhat naturally. When I was studying Polish, I was taught in a similar way.
For instance: To learn numbers, I would say one, one two, one two three, one two three four, etc. My mind is thinking of the next number in the sequence and less so on the earlier numbers (which I was also learning). This seemed to allow me to memorize those words (the numbers) quicker. Perhaps they’re stored in the brain differently when acquired this way.