Still beats Portuguese… at least our common used subjunctives are present and past, Portuguese even has future subjunctive.
Luckily for them, they also have the personal infinitive, a way of not using the subjunctive.
And those are the really easy ones, Mighty_Girl! I know that ser and estar confuse a lot of beginners, but they’re pretty logical compared to, say, the “double-negatives” that I mentioned earlier. Throwing in hay kind of adds a third form of “to be” as we see as English speakers. So, estar – state, or state of being. In a way, it makes more sense than in English for certain uses, differentiating between something that strictly is and something that describes a state. I’ll admit, though, that I still sometimes screw them up if I try to speak to quickly!
For the other verbs, luckily most of them follow a pretty standard methodology to conjugate them. Yeah, there are the irregulars, but they’re mosty the same verbs that are irregular in English and they’re the minority. Of course I approach this as a speaker (and reader) and not at all as a writer or in any professional capacity – this is where having the gringo accent makes it hard to determine whether I’ve spoken strictly correctly or not. Sure, one day I’d like to learn “perfect” Spanish, but in the meantime I’m happy to communicate on an adult level, even sounding ridiculous. Honestly, I hate hearing recordings of my Spanish, because it’s pretty horrible compared to the Latinos I heard (but better than many other gringos I’ve heard).
And I like haber – it follows English really closely, usage-wise. I probably tend to overuse it Spanish, though, being an English speaker. I like to say “Has comido?” instead of “Comiste?” because in English I’d say “Have you eaten?” rather than “You ate?” or “Did you eat?”
I learned about the word “soler” here on the SDMB! I never see it mentioned in any of the books on Spanish I have. But it’s a cool little word that’s kind of like “used to” in English.
Of course, with English being our native language, any other language will seem hard. I actually took German, French, and Spanish in high school (bored senior year having transferred from a better school district to crummy, “outcome-based-instruction” school), so I kind of guess I know how to learn a language. I really, really helped living in Germany and now being married to a Spanish-speaker. As for French, well, c’est la vi – I don’t remember much more than that. 
Ok. I’ll bite (and hijack a little).
If Spanish doesn’t have future subjunctive, how does one say something like “If you go there, …”?
This would be rendered in Portuguese as such: “Se você for lá, …” with “for” being the future subjunctive of “ir”
And what’s an example of the “personal infinitive” in Portuguese that you referred to?
But you don’t need a subjunctive for “If you (will) go there”, do you? It’s just “Si vas allí” or “Si iras allí”. The action hasn’t happened yet, so there’s no distinction between a factual and a counter-factual condition. The subjunctive is more for hypotheticals like “If you were to go there” - “Si vayas allí”, or “if you had gone there” - “Si hubieras ido”.
I am not a Spanish-speaker, and my memories of the grammar are somewhat hazy, so every word of the foregoing is open to correction.
We use the present subjunctive tense (or the past one, I can’t remember exactly). There is a future subjunctive, it is just not used to the degree it is used in Portuguese. That is, there are not much more than a list in the “how to conjugate a verb” table.
Vou esperar até voces chegarem instead of Vou esperar até que voce cheguem.
Not much change in that example, but can be easier if it is one of the irregular verbs.
I’ve learned Spanish at an Outcomes based university and i’ve learned how to use it BETTER here than i did in a traditional HS. We’ve had to prove we know how to use the language because we are made to give presentations and participate in class. You can fail and “not know how to learn a language” at ANY style of school. It’s actually using it and being tested on using it that helps with fluency. I know people who learned the “traditional” way and learned nothing because they just regurgitated what they were told to “know”.
That’s what I was looking for. I thought that Spanish had the same bits available.
I guess I hear and use that personal infinitive all of the time without even knowing what it is. I’m sure that there are some nasty rules about its correct usage. I must investigate this.
Different strokes for different folks. A Brazilian would use the future subjunctive in that phrase – it sounds odd to say “Se você vai lá”
Could be a regional thing, too. There is room for debate on whether it is necessary since the event being discussed is (by definition of a future event) hypothetical, and hypothetical events are quite well described using subjunctive tenses.
Many pardons for continuing this tangent.
Doobieous, what I meant was that the whole school was a crummy, outcome-based school. It catered to the lowest common denominator. In my senior year, I’d already topped out on all of the highest levels of science, math, and so on. I took three languages, band, journalism, and swimming because there was nothing else to take. Funny thing is, it was considered a “good” school. Hah! I’d come from a better district with real, advanced placement classes. But at that age you don’t get to make those kinds of choices. I notice that what the school does now that it didn’t do then for non-stupid people is ship them off to the community college for classes.
I also meant that I think I’m pretty good at knowing how to learn a language just 'cos I’ve taken a lot of them. Heck, actaully at the time German was easiest, or I had a better teacher. The French and Spanish didn’t stick. By time I restarted Spanish at Berlitz in Mexico, I guess it was a good start, though.
OK, i see what you’re saying now :). The wording was vague for me.
My High School was fairly good, even though it was in a shitty school district (about a couple of years after I had graduated, they went 5 million in bankruptcy and are still in deep water).
It’s still easier than learning the rules for future subjunctive and the irregular verbs conjugations in the subjunctive.
I’m late to this thread, but a trick I learned to pronounce “perro” was to pronounce it “petter-o”.
Say it fast though.
I can’t do a sustained trill without setting up my tongue and breathing hard out my mouth, so the above trick is the only thing that works in conversation for me.
-k