Spanish Lessons

Introduction

Welcome to the Spanish lessons page, where you can learn about aspects of the language and practice/reinforce what you've learned through related activities. The Spanish lessons presented here are organized into these categories:

  • Purpose - Achieving ends through language in different situations
  • Grammar - Structure and rules of the Spanish laguage
  • Verbs - Regular and irregular verbs, conjugations, tenses
  • Vocabulary - Themed groups of words

Feel free to explore these lessons on your own. If you're taking a class with Alaina, you'll work through selected lessons in each of our class meetings.

We welcome your feedback. You can contact us for advice with lesson planning or to request that a specific type of lesson be developed for this page.

Purpose

This section is for purpose-driven communication. That is, this section focuses on modeling conversations that people typically have in a language.

Remember:

  • Communication is a purpose-drive activity. We need to be able to ask and answer questions and chain coherent strings of thought together into narratives.
  • If you've been understood, you've achieved a primary purpose of communication, no matter if your delivery was completely correct or not.

Work through lessons in this section to practice conversational skills for general contexts and in more specific situations.

Grammar

In language, grammar refers to the building blocks of language, such as personal pronouns (`I`, `you`, and `we` in English and `yo`, `tú`, and `nosotros` or `nosotras` in Spanish), articles (the, a, an, some), and prepositions (of, at). We use different elements from the building blocks of grammar to construct sentences when we communicate.

As you learn about grammar:

  • You'll also learn the names for different types of grammatical structures.
  • You'll be able to start putting sentences together

Get practice related to specific aspects of grammar in this collection of lessons.

Verbs

Here are lessons associated specifically with verbs. Verbs are action words. Verbs can be used to:

  • Describe what you and other people are like
  • Describe what you and other people do

Within the basic `subject + verb + object` (SVO) sentence structure, verbs describe the action the subject takes. Spanish is a language in which the verb needs to be conjugated (changed in form) to correspond with the subject. You can practice verb conjugation in these practice drills.

Vocabulary

In these lessons, we'll work on building up the number of nouns (people, places and things), adjectives (words that describe nouns), and adverbs (words that describe verbs) in your vocabulary.

When we work on vocabulary:

  • We'll be working with themed lists of words.
  • You'll be encouraged to use the vocabulary along with building blocks from grammar and verbs to communicate about a topic.

Build and solidify your Spanish vocabulary in these lessons.