Spanish 3: free lessons and course outline

Third-year Spanish is the year of the subjunctive, and students who find the year hard almost always find this one thing hard. The mood is mechanical to form and difficult to choose, so this course spends units 2 to 6 on it, one idea at a time. Unit 1 reviews the second year in seven lessons so that nothing later rests on a forgotten ending. Unit 2 teaches what the subjunctive is and how to form it, including the spelling changes and the six verbs that break the rule. Unit 3 uses it for wishes, requests and advice. Unit 4 uses it for emotion and doubt, and for the contrast with certainty. Unit 5 takes it into adjective and adverbial clauses, where the question is whether the thing is known and whether the event has happened. Unit 6 teaches the imperfect subjunctive and the sequence of tenses. Unit 7 combines it with the conditional in si clauses, so that the student can say what would happen. Unit 8 adds the perfect tenses, including the ones that let a student speak about regret and what might have been. Unit 9 is the passive, the se constructions and the relative pronouns, which turn short sentences into long ones. Unit 10 covers reported speech, the verbs that demand a preposition, register and the connectors of argument. Unit 11 turns to a short story, a poem, the Spanish-speaking world and California, a debate and a final presentation. Every lesson opens with the method, names the specific error that costs the marks, works an example in eight steps, and gives ten practice problems with complete answers. There is no audio, so the course asks the student to read every Spanish example aloud.