Toward the end of the first semester or at the beginning of the second quarter of the academic year in which freshmen normally study a foreign language, those who are studying Spanish and are thus far successful, will encounter fresh surprises and challenges. This happens just before or after the winter holidays. Often, spirits are either too high to pay attention or the post-holidays' blues have set in, along with (often) the wintry weather and flu season. Aside from all that background noise that contributes to much of students' troubles in school at that time, here is what they must deal with, roughly mid year:
1. They are faced with the two simple past tenses of Spanish: the preterite and the imperfect. In grammar-ese, simple does not mean easy, it means one-word form. These tenses should be and could be easier than they are. In terms of form, there are only three irregular verbs in the entire language, in the imperfect. There are many verbs which are quite irregular in the preterite -- having new stems. The fact that a student knows the present well, even perfectly, will not help him or her derive the form of a verb in the preterite. Students often become discouraged at this point -- so they must learn to keep things straight and reference everything to and from the infinitives.
2. Command forms of tú, usted and ustedes, affirmative and negative. Students don't know it, but if they do not learn the Ud. commands, they will likely fail the next quarter or the current semester. The present subjunctive forms are all based on the form of the usted command! The placement of object pronouns is related to commands, since they must be attached to affirmative commands at the end of the verb, but must come before the verb in a negative command.
3. Direct and Indirect Object Pronouns and pronoun placement. The placement of object pronouns in Spanish is more flexible than English but there are only two possibilities -- after and connected to an infinitive or gerund, or just in front of a conjugated verb. This word order can be confusing for English speakers, but it is easily overcome if they reduce it to formula and consciously compare the two languages.
