Harry Potter y los Tiempos Verbales de la Muerte*

[fire_everything]

I mentioned in the previous post that only one of my two weekend projects was Snape-related, but on second thought, why can’t studying for my final involve Snape as well? Please join me as I attempt to master and differentiate twelve, count ‘em, twelve Spanish verb tenses by using them to describe major Snape-related events from the Harry Potter

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[shyfoxling]

English has subjunctive too, for the same sorts of purposes (wishing, speculative...). It's why we say "If I were queen" rather than "If I was queen".

[fire_everything]

Grammar nerds in the house!

You're right about the English subjunctive, but man, it is child's play compared to the Spanish one. Out of curiosity I went to the English section of verbix.com and put in some verbs, and discovered that English has four subjunctive tenses, which in most cases are exactly the same as the indicative ones. Spanish, on the other hand, has EIGHT, and not only are they always different from the indicative, all the subjects except "I" and "he" are different from EACH OTHER. So basically, the existence of the subjunctive means you have to learn forty new forms of each verb. Wow, I actually feel better now - it's not just me, this shit really is crazy

[shyfoxling]

Grammar nerds in the house!

Reprazent! (which I want to read as "r@-PRAY-zent" or "r@-PRAH-zent"... oh, orthography...)

but man, it is child's play compared to the Spanish one.

I dunno; I don't recall finding el subjuntivo that difficult when I studied Spanish in high school (which, disclaimer, was 15+ years ago; I don't really remember it now) once I got the hang of just what it was really used for. I think some of the handicap here is that most native English speakers don't learn English in this way, and so when you throw a lot of grammar terms at them in a foreign language, their eyes kind of glaze over.

[fire_everything]

Just returned from my final. *staggers drunkenly down Lexington Avenue* I had a mild post-exam argument with my prof, who thought it would be funny to ask us for the past perfect subjunctive form of imprimir, a verb we'd never encountered in class whose past participle just happens to be totally irregular. ¿Impreso? ¿WTF? And I've just now looked it up on Verbix, which says that BOTH impreso and imprimido (my attempted conjugation) are correct! He will be hearing from me about this.

I am impressed to hear of your high school facility with the subjunctive. In my defense, I will say that my course was an intensive one - two semesters' worth of material in just under two months - and there was a new verb tense thrown at us every other day. My eyes are only now starting to uncross.

I think some of the handicap here is that most native English speakers don't learn English in this way, and so when you throw a lot of grammar terms at them in a foreign language, their eyes kind of glaze over.This was definitely true of me. The names of the

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[anonymous]

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