Spanish has never been a problematic subject for me until this year. Freshman year, I had a stellar teacher - one I’m going to already for help, although it’s mainly her doublechecking what I’ve written for my projects; last/sophomore year, I had a teacher whose class was an easy A, and because my WHAP teacher was incredibly hard on us, I spent most of my time focusing on her class and neglecting Spanish.
…Which leads me to this year. Due to a weak foundation of Spanish 2 principles - partly a result of my negligence and partly because my teacher did NOT teach at all last year (and when we did projects, they were graded with extreme laxness - as long as we did them, we received an A, basically) - my Spanish 3 grades have been bad (per my standards).
Our teacher is extremely nitpicky on grammar, and although I’ve been improving marginally and trying to study the grammar - it’s not that I don’t get it, but in practice, it proves to be a lot harder to use than in one-sentence examples - I’m still struggling.
Please, if any of you have tips for doing well in Spanish (3 or 4, etc), let me know! I might be overreacting but at the same time, doing well in every class is important to me and my Spanish grades have been one of my main stressors this year ://
Anyway - thank you for any and all help! It’s greatly appreciated. (Sorry this was such a long block of text!)
I would get a tutor! Tutors can really help understand why you have trouble with certain issues. If you have any questions, contact me for simple concepts, I take Spanish (obviously I can’t do whole lessons though!)
Just using grammar in writing. The concepts I get, and I know there are ample online resources to help me practice the concepts - it’s just my writing that I have trouble with, and usually get marked down for. Pronunciation is probably my strongest :’)) @Faultystart
Would you mind PM ing an example of your writing (maybe an old project or paper?) That might help me pin down what you might be struggling with.
From my experience as a volunteer Spanish tutor (I’m a senior in HS), I’m going to just list a few areas I think might be problematic for you and some suggestions.
Preterit v. Imperfect
-use StudySpanish to practice when to use which tense.
-Think of Imperfect as description in the past (Was eating, was snowing outside) and Preterit as a completed action (BAM! He ate. It snowed.) This tends to be a problematic concept for English speakers, as English’s past tense mixes these two ideas.
Vocabulary
Take every vocab sheet from Spanish 1 and put it into Quizlet. Spend 45 mins everyday on one section of a list and I promise it’ll be grilled into your mind.
Weird Conjugation In Present
Stem-Changers
Consider the idea of a boot verb. You only change stem in yo/tú/él/ellos form. Practice conjugating all of these verbs each day so it becomes second nature.
Weird Conjugation in Preterit
Just have to memorize the conjugations to words like tener and querer. Repetition, again, is key.
Random Pronoun Issues
Know the difference between direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish and how they are used.
Hope this helps you and please PM me if you want specific study stategies. I need to see a sample of your work but we can only use English on this forum.
