How many tenses for an A*?

I'm wondering how many tenses to use to get an A* and how many examples to include.

I've learnt the conditional, imperfect and preterite as well as present.

thanks
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noor

Could you please specify which language you are learning?

Spanish

In which case, you need:

- present
- present continuous (estoy trabajando)
- future (trabajaré)
- conditional (trabajaría)
- preterite (trabajé)
- perfect (he trabajado)
- imperfect (trabajaba)
- past continous (estaba trabajando)
- pluperfect (había trabajado)

You should try to use as many of these as you possibly can in your work.

I know that in some schools top candidates are also taught some subjunctive phrases to include, so you might look into that as well. For example: Cuando sea mayor - when I am older; si fuera verdad - if it were true.

In which case, you need:

- present
- present continuous (estoy trabajando)
- future (trabajaré)
- conditional (trabajaría)
- preterite (trabajé)
- perfect (he trabajado)
- imperfect (trabajaba)
- past continous (estaba trabajando)
- pluperfect (había trabajado)

You should try to use as many of these as you possibly can in your work.

I know that in some schools top candidates are also taught some subjunctive phrases to include, so you might look into that as well. For example: Cuando sea mayor - when I am older; si fuera verdad - if it were true.

whoa... do those exist in English? 0_0

English has about 12

English has about 12

whoa... do those exist in English? 0_0

whoa! :O

the perfect continuous ones are a bit unusual... are they like that in Spanish too?
i didn't learn English like that lol - I just learned by watching movies with subtitles and speaking to my friends... what do you think is the best way to learn a language?

No idea about Spanish sorry, OP this is where you can help

They sound fine to me in English - I agree the future one is a little bit weird and I can only imagine using it by saying "I will have been going to school for five years tomorrow" as an example.

Think it's dependent on the individual how best it is to learn. Reading Articles/Listening to music/watching shows in said language are all pretty good and helped me a lot with German, and speaking to people definitely will (hence how i've hit my impasse ), but with some you do need to study the grammar a fair bit to understand what's going on...
no name's mentioned..
.
German.

whoa! :O

the perfect continuous ones are a bit unusual... are they like that in Spanish too?
i didn't learn English like that lol - I just learned by watching movies with subtitles and speaking to my friends... what do you think is the best way to learn a language?

Your method is OK if all you want to do is have a bit of chit chat etc. at a low level.

But for those who want to be able to master the language it's a much more serious thing.

You need a good grammar book. It will cover all the important usages in the language. You need to learn them all by heart and practise making your own variations.

In particular it will have all the regular and common irregular verbs in all the tenses.You need to know all these by heart with the English equivalents as in this thread plus the conditional I should / would work, conditional perfect I should/ would have worked, sujuctives etc.

You need to have a small book in which you note down every new word you come across when reading a book, listening to a native speaker, reading a newspaper, in some standard form indicating for nouns the gender, any irregularities of usage; for adjectives eg masculine and feminine forms,

Numbers of course in French have all sorts of pitfalls and peculiarities. Learn them.

For language learning it's little and often, not great marathon cramming sessions. So take out your grammar or vocabulary lists every day. Aim to learn say 20 new phrases by pacing up and down reciting them. 30 times. In this way you keep your brain alert and you practise the pronunciation which you will have heard or checked carefully beforehand. There's no room for approximations. It has to be perfect. So in French eg. if you pronounce le car - (the coach) like car in English, you're on the wrong track! To perfect your pronunciation you need to listen to snippets of a native speaker, stopping the recording after every phrase to try and repeat it exactly yourself.

Next day you learn another 20 words AND you go over the last lot you learnt, and so on for ever.... It's hard work and I repeat cannot be done in a rush at the last minute. If you don't learn thoroughly over your whole course you will not get a top mark.

Be ruthless with yourself . NO cheating. You start by covering up the English in your lists and trying to guess the meaning of the French words. Then vice versa - much more difficult. Finally you repeat but writing down the French . If you get any wrong , you start again.

Hmm well it worked for English but I spoke Dutch before (born in the Netherlands ) so maybe because they're both Germanic languages it made it easier to learn? Also - some rules don't exist in English like they do in other languages... for example in Arabic the verb changes depending on the pronoun. Like with "she said" and "he said" - you can't just change the pronouns and keep the verb the same, the verb changes as well. Maybe that makes it a bit easier too...

My friends do Spanish A-level and do most of the things you said, and it really does work they're speaking fluently to each other and the teacher! :O They have lessons in Spanish! It's really cool :3

Growing up, I was taught Arabic by my parents so I've heard all those weird sounds you'd make when pronouncing letters in a certain accent guess it made me pretty adaptable.
Thanks for all the advice! I'll be sure to use it when it comes to learning languages because I've always wanted to speak Spanish fluently and actually hold a conversation like I would in Arabic or English (I have no idea why I didn't do it for A-level... I got an A in the GCSE). Maybe I can be one of those polyglots that speak like seven different languages X'D

It's relatively easy to learn a language for social purposes . Missionaries used to be given just a few weeks. The real test comes when you have to write it down or convey complex ideas or use it professionally. As for translation it's a real art form. It's the first foreign language you learn which is the hardest. After that you already have the techniques which will help whichever language you want to learn. Spanish is not as difficult as French or Russian. You may be right about the advantage of knowing Dutch when it comes to learning English. The telltale signs of a foreigner in the UK are usually wrong intonation or pronunciation and English spelling is so difficult.

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This is just a really general question ,what is the difference between the imperfect and preterite? In German they are exactly the same thing (just 1 tense) which is why I can't seem to get my head around how this actually works in Spanish

Imperfect is used when describing this you used to do or describing how it was like. But the preterite is just a one off action e.g.:

bailé con mis amigos - I danced with my friends

- noor

Ohhh I see.

In the nicest way possible to the Spanish, does that actually help at all with understanding a sentence? Like if you accidentally used preterite instead of imperfect would the meaning be wildly different or essentially still understood?