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Spanish - Can Someone Explain?

Sorry to keep bothering you guys with threads, but....

Would someone be able to explain to me what the following are with examples please?

Gerund
Past participle
Preterite
Subjunctive

I think I know what they are, but the long words for them confuse me.

Thanks a lot

b1 :smile:

Reply 1

*Farfalla*

Gerund is the present continuous.... in english it's the verbs that end in -ing like while i eat, my brother is reading a book.

The Past Participle is used for all perfect forms of the verb e.g I have taken - this second half of the verb is the past participle... if you really want to know... the first bit is called the auxiliary.

The preterite is a tense that expresses an action taking place at a definite time in the past. It is contrasted with the imperfect tense, which expresses an action that took place at an indefinite time or has not been completed. The preterite is the tense that would normally be thought of as the past tense in English.

Finally the subjunctive - good question! some teachers like to call it a mood but don't let it confuse you. There isn't really an equivalent in english... have you used phrases such as 'Cuando sea mayor...'? This 'sea' is part of the verb Ser but i wouldn't worry about till you get to AS and a tacher can do a better job of explaining than me.

Hope that helps x

Reply 2

33.33.33

Gerund- continuous present such as i am playing
Past participle- the form of the verb used to form tenses, such as the perfect - i have eaten. eaten is the past participle, in this case, he comido
Preterite- this is a tense, which describes an action which happened at a definite time. this is what people refer to as the main "past tense" although never say that to a teacher as they will get irritated and rant about how there are many past tenses. i played football, for example is the pretirite. other past tenses such as the perfect( i HAVE played football) or the pluperfect (i HAD played football) are formed differently.
Subjunctive-this is difficult to describe. simply, when anything is "subjective" there isn't really one in english as someone above said, but the best way of explaining is when something isn't definite. im doing alevel and i'm still not sure about it, the best way to learn would be by asking a teacher. there are also set phrases that take the subjunctive, it helps to learn these, or at least a few that you can slip into your work to make it look like you know how to use the subjunctive!
x

Reply 3

Excalibur

My teacher loves the subjunctive tense for some reason, but I still don't know what it is. I haven't come across it that often in practice exams (although they do sneak in sometimes), so I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

Reply 4

leannemarie

Just some additional points:
Gerund: the gerund of trabajar is trabajando. If you want to say 'by working, I will get better' you say 'trabajando, blah blah...' you don't need the word for 'by' in Spanish.
Subjunctive: an example in English is 'If I were you'.
I can run through a list of needs for the subjunctive if you want some more help.

Reply 5

*fatty*

Hey. I agree with Excalibur over not worrying too much about the subjunctive for GCSE. In terms of reading and listening it's pretty easy to pick out (as the words are pretty much the same as usual, just with the opposite endings to usual e.g. 'Quiero que hables conmigo' - I want you to talk with me - with 'hables' instead of 'hablas'). The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to learn a couple of stock phrases for the writing exam that warrant the subjunctive mood, for example 'No me sorprende que...' (it doesn't surprise me that...' for e.g. 'no me sorprende que los toreros tengan tanto popularidad') and espero que (I hope that...). These two ALWAYS carry the subjunctive in the next verb and therefore if you can stick them in somewhere you've shown that you not only recognise the subjunctive, but that you also know when it needs to be used in your own writing (whether that bit's true or not!).

Sorry for the ramble, hope that's helped a bit!

Reply 6

Cunning Linguist

Excalibur

it might help if you don't actually think of it as a tense. The subjunctive has always been one of them things that confuses people.

it's just another form of a verb that is used with certain phrases/at certain times. For example, in French, when you use "even though.." (Bien que) the verb after it is ALWAYS in the subjunctive. (eg, "bien qu'ils soient" = "even though they are..") Normally, the present tense form of the 3rd person of "être" would be sont but here it is not, since you need to use the subjunctive.

The reason you shouldn't think of it as a tense is because you can have present subjunctive, perfect subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive etc (although not all of them are used all the time)

Reply 7

brimstone

linguist786

The reason you shouldn't think of it as a tense is because you can have present subjunctive, perfect subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive etc (although not all of them are used all the time)

Present subjunctive? Past? :confused:

... I don't have to worry about these for GCSE do I? And if I do, are they just long names for something I probably already know?

Thanks for the help so far guys!

Reply 8

paddy

brimstone

Present subjunctive? Past? :confused:

... I don't have to worry about these for GCSE do I? And if I do, are they just long names for something I probably already know?

Thanks for the help so far guys!

Basically the subjunctive is used to express hope, doubt or uncertainty. There is no way you'll ever need to know anything beyond the present subjunctive anyway, perhaps not even that.
An example of a phrase using the imperfect subjunctive would be:
Si ganara la lotería, compraría un coche.
"If I were to win the lottery, I would buy a car."
This set kind of phrase is useful and includes a conditional; I learned it for my GCSE, plus it'll impress examiners a lot.
BUT don't use it if you don't want to, you're not expected to know the subjunctive at your level.
Don't worry :smile: