Why Study Spanish? Is It Worth the Extra Effort? Some Guidance for Counselors

But the beginning student is soon coping, or trying to cope, with some nasty complications: there are two verbs that more or less correspond to English to be; there are many concepts in which English to be corresponds to Spanish to have; there are two Spanish verbs to have, a dozen ways to express time, two simple past tenses, and a vigorous and enthusiastic use of the subjunctive, including two alternating forms of its imperfect tense. How did we ever come to think that Spanish was easy? No one who has ever seriously studied it would agree. Maybe we got the wrong impression because it used to be chosen by a lot of students who were looking for an easy language. And some teachers, facing classes of lazy nonlinguists, watered down the daily dose of Spanish. Without standards, any subject can be made easy, and the result was a lot of Spanish-is-fun, your-money-back-ifit-hurts courses, with textbooks written not to teach the learner but to entertain the non-learner

Business · Educational and Psychological Assessments · Literacy and Educational Practices · Parental Involvement in Education · Psychology

• Working Together

  Open Access•Helene Z Loew•Foreign Language Annals•1978

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