Improve your Spanish reading and dictionary skills
Even if you don’t speak the language fluently yet, Spanish can be extremely accessible in written form. If you understand most of the words in a text, it is often possible to deduce the meaning of an unknown word. When you need to look up a word in the dictionary, an obstacle may be that the dictionary does not include the exact form it finds in the text. But some basic rules can help you locate the word and discover its meaning without detailed knowledge of Spanish grammar.
Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to reading Spanish is its verbal system. Spanish, like other related languages (but unlike English) has a synthetic Verb system: In other words, Spanish verbs can have a large number of different forms. However, as a practical way to start reading Spanish more proficiently, one strategy to consider is (a) learning the most common irregular verb forms directly, along with the typical idiomatic meanings they may have; (b) learn some general rules that allow you to deduce the person / time and, if necessary, look up most of the other verb forms.
So, coming back to the common verb forms first, which one should I really learn? From a sample of 2,000 newspaper and magazine articles in Spanish, the following are among the most common verb forms:
(1) Say ah is combined with another verb, and means “he / she / has …”; the next word will usually end in -ado gold -do, and it will be the equivalent of an English form ending in -ed (technically called the ‘past participle’). To look up this past participle in the dictionary, you usually replace the ending -do with -r. For example, if you see has asked, the way to look in the dictionary is to ask. You will see that this means “to ask”, and therefore has asked half “he / she asked”. Almost 50% of the sample articles contained this construction!
(2) they have, present in almost 30% of the sample articles, is the plural equivalent of Say ah and media “they have …”.
(3) It was Y He said generally means It was Y saying respectively, and are the simple past tenses of the verbs to be (“be be”) Y tell (“tell”). The plural forms are They were Y they said, sense “They were” Y “they said” respectively.
(4) there was is a form of imperfect tense that is often used to mean “there was / there was …”.
(5) made is a simple past form of the verb do, and generally means “he / she / did it”, “he / she / did”.
(6) might is a conditional form of the verb can, sense “be able”; the shape might is often equivalent to English “might”, “maybe I can”;
(7) been is he past participle of the verb to be: in other words, it literally means condition, and is often combined with Say ah gold they have mentioned above (eg. has been … = he / she has been …);
(8) will flee is a form commonly known as past subjunctive: it means was / were when expressing a hypothetical condition, as in if he will flee … (“If i were …”); Traditionally, this form is not learned until late in a Spanish course, but it actually occurs in 6% of the articles surveyed.
A large proportion of the searches submitted to my own online Spanish-English dictionary come from this list of extremely common verb forms. In other words, there is evidence that many readers could improve their reading fluency simply by being more judicious about which word forms they choose to learn beforehand. As you can see, we are actually tackling a lot of grammar topics that as part of learning to speak Spanish fluently, you would need to address more fully. But treating these common verb forms on a case-by-case basis is simply suggested as a pragmatic reading strategy.
For decoding verbs in general, an online or electronic dictionary like the one I mention can help a lot. Given most verb forms, the dictionary will understand the form and lead you to the corresponding entry. However, you will still improve your reading fluency if you know a few common rules of thumb, such as:
– The forms of the verbs in the present tense “he / she / it” end in -To (replace with -Arkansas look in the dictionary) or -me (replace with -er gold -go).
– The form “they” ends in -year (replace with -Arkansas) gold -in (replace with -er gold -go) In present tense. (Each of the “they” that are formed in the language ends in -do not In any case.)
– If the verb form has an ending that begins in -ba (e.g they asked), then you have a past tense form; replace the part that begins with -ba with -r. So in this case, the verb is to ask; the meaning is “they were asking”, “they used to ask”– the final notice -do not marking the they form.
– A verb ending in -I a is the equivalent of -ba, but for verbs ending in -er gold -go. For example, I used to eat comes from the verb contender, sense “to eat” (so I used to eat would probably mean “he / she was eating”, “I used to eat”).
– However, the end -estuary (notice the ‘r’) is generally equivalent to English “would do …”. In this case, remove -I a, -would etc to get the base verb. Then I would ask half “he / she would ask”.
– A word ending in -or it’s probably a “he she that” simple past tense form; replace -or with -Arkansas, Y -io with -er gold -go, to find the base verb.
– Tea they simple past tense forms end in -Ron, and specifically usually -Aron (replace with -Arkansas look for the verb) or -you (replace with -er gold -go).
I hope I have suggested, then, how with a little judicious learning, a strategy for understanding Spanish articles of some complexity can be developed. With this strategy, reading will help you to acquire new vocabulary and, above all, to be more useful and enjoyable.