The Spanish Suckjunctive: Alternatives?

Factual Questions
1

First, a rant, because I’m feeling a bit frustrated right now.

I’ve been working to speak better Spanish for several years now. Not intensively, but I do keep up with it. I’m at the point (finally) where I can not only communicate, but think in Spanish and have a conversation without mentally translating everything. So everything’s going along except…

The fucking SUBJUNCTIVE!

It’s not a problem of not knowing when to use it: I have an ear for that and I know when I should be transitioning to the subjunctive. The problem is I just can’t deal with fifteen trizillion more verb forms in a language where it’s hard enough to cope with the thirty quadrillion of them in the indicative. It’s just more than I can handle. I don’t want to study it more. I don’t want to work on it more. I want to put it in the oven and bake till done.

So, realizing that I will never be able to come up with the Spanish equivalent of something like, “If you hadn’t parked there, you wouldn’t have gotten a ticket,” I admitted to myself that I will just have to fall back on the native speakers to know what I mean and, hopefully, be forgiving just as I would be if a Spanish speaker said to me, “If you didn’t park there, you didn’t to get a ticket.”

Considering that, here are three possible alternatives:

  1. Plug in the infinitive.
  2. Use the conditional.
  3. Stay in the indicative.

Yes, I realize all of these will make me sound stupid. All I want to know is: which will sound the LEAST stupid?

2

Certainly not the infinitive. That will make you sound like Tarzan.:wink:

3

It will depend on the exact sentence. Your example? It actually calls for a conditional on the second clause, at least in theory: for most verbs, the conditionals are identical to one of the two versions of the subjunctive pasts, which leads to many people using them interchangeably.

So, grammar class:
Si no hubieras aparcado ahí, no te habrían multado.

Alternative version:
Si no hubieses aparcado ahí, no te habrían multado.

Alternative “you guys remember grammar class too, right” version (shit-eating grin optional):
Si no hubieras o hubieses aparcado ahí, no te hubieran o hubiesen multado.

Alternatively, you may wish to acquire a loincloth or a plastic war bonnet (I don’t recommend a real one).

4

When you get that down pat, you oughta try learning Hebrew verbs.

5

Once you get used to it, the subjunctive in Spanish is one of the most beautiful moods there is. I am in love with it. My advice is to just learn it.

6

Now that it’s not 6am and I’m feeling more charitable:

First, movie-Tarzan grammar will be understandable. If people aren’t sure and if they think they can do it without offending you, they’ll ask for clarification (if they don’t trust that they can ask you for clarification without causing offense, they will either hope to get clarity later or ask someone else for clarification - neither of which is very good).

Second, do you expect foreigners to speak English perfectly? To never use a false friend, always have perfect grammar, never have an accent? We don’t have such an expectation from people for whom Spanish is a second language.

Third, when to use the suckjunctive? Depending on which grammar book you open, Spanish has 3 or 4 modes. Let’s call it 4 because I think it will make this easier to explain.
Indicative: either it’s true or we believe it will be “except for Will Of God kind of stuff”. El sol está brillando, el sol ha salido hace un rato, el sol saldrá mañana (“The sun is shining, the sun came up some time ago, the sun will come up tomorrow”).
Imperative: orders. Sol, brilla! (“Sun, shine!” Isn’t it nice how quickly it obeyed me?)
Conditional: consequences of a previously-stated condition (the name is kind of misleading if you ask me, but apparently consequential was considered too mouthy).
Subjunctive: low probability or none, or it’s a hypotetical. Si no hubieras aparcado ahí… “If you hadn’t parked there…” - you already parked there, so the probability that you will have not parked there is nil.

Si yo fuera rico - Tevye isn’t rich, so nobody adresses him as Reb Tevye.

Quisiera volverme hiedra - “I would wish to becom ivy”. OK, so why don’t you wish it? Because dude may be stalkerish but he’s not completely dumb. He realizes that, one, he can’t become ivy, and two, if he did what the rest of the song says and climbed into his beloved’s window she’d be more likely to brain him than kiss him.

Si la abuela llega a los 110… “If Grandma reaches 110…” is an assumption: indicative.
Si la abuela llegase a los 110… “Were Grandma to reach 110…” is a hypothesis: subjunctive.

7

Sometimes, sounding too good can be a disadvantage. When I lived in Brazil in high school, I found that I was unusually talented at mimicking the sounds and cadences of Portuguese, and I was pretty quickly able to speak with almost no accent. However, since I sounded native, strangers tended to at first assume I was native, and would start speaking far too quickly and complicated for me to follow. I was constantly having to interrupt people and tell them that I didn’t actually understand Portuguese extremely well. If I had sounded like Tarzan, they would have made the right assumption from the beginning.

8

In Peru we would say

Si no te hubieses/hubieras cuadrado ahí no te hubiesen/hubieran multado/puesto una multa.

9

Four moods, seventeen verb tenses, three persons singular and plural (*plus a cheat for second person formal using third person verbs), plus infinitive and gerund each simple and compound, and participle. Regular and irregular, three conjugations, AND reflexives.

And folks around here insist in calling English “el difícil”! It just does its future by adding “will” to the present or mentioning it’s happening tomorrow!

Used to be called “Potential” but got renamed. At least we did not have to deal with the terminology of the Bello grammar. Antepostpreterite, anyone?
And won’t someone think of the lawyers? Without future subjunctive, contracts and statutes in Spanish would not sound quite as lawery.

10

JRDelirious, thank you for understanding. I’m glad at least one other person gets it. (Though I realize you’re being tongue in cheek.) :slight_smile:

11

** funky little lee**, as a first step just learn the important ones, like the forms of “haber,” “ser,” “estar,” “querer,” and “tener.” They form the root of what you’re trying to say. For the rest of the verbs or other cases of the subjunctive, I just tend to mumble through them. It’s obvious I have an accent, and so people just take it as an accent issue! “¡Que comas bien!” or “¡Que comes bien!” – perfectly understandable when I say it either way.

Nava, as a native Spanish-Spanish speaker, what do you mean by the grammar class and alternative version? I’m a non-native Mexican Spanish speaker, and “hubieras/hubieran” is in use exclusively. My understanding was the “hubieses” version was exclusive to Spain (and some Latin American countries); it’s how Mexicans seem to know someone isn’t Mexican. And the complete “you remember grammar school version” – what’s in the world is the explanation of that? What a mouthful!

When would you typically choose to use one or the other?

Also, Mexican, I would say “Si la abuela llegara a los 110…” Or in Mexico I might actually say, “Si la abuela tuviera ruedas sería un coche.”

12

I mean that both of those are equally “grammatically valid”, but they’re officially version 1 and version 2. Hubieras o hubieses are the two alternative forms of the same tense, the subjunctive’s simple past of haber (2nd person singular); in combination with the participle of another verb it forms the perfect past of that other verb (in my translation, aparcado; cuadrado for Ají’s version; I’ve heard parado in other locations but for Spain parar and aparcar are different).

The mouthful is a joke. In Spanish class, if we had “fill in the blanks” and the sentence called for a subjunctive past, you were supposed to choose either option, but in the much more common situation of being asked to recite or write all forms for a given tense, you had to recite the whole thing. No options. No “but it’s valid”. The point was to show that you knew it all, so it all you had to provide.

[sing-song voice]Yo hubiera o hubiese
Tú hubieras o hubieses
Él, ella, ello hubiera o hubiese
Nosotros, nosotras hubiéramos o hubiésemos
Vosotros, vosotras hubiérais o hubiéseis
Ellos, ellas hubieran o hubiesen.[/ssv][deep breath]

Note that Ají’s example uses both forms; the vocabulary is different but the grammar is the same.

Lo siento querido, but what you guys are famous for is your considerandos. There would be no legal system without considerandos! (“Considering…” each of the relevant items of a sentence, or even of the reasoning behind a piece of legislation).