How important is learning the subjunctive?
I sometimes get confused as to when exactly the subjunctive needs to be used. I can understand when someone is making a suggestion or recommendation, but other than that I am still struggling. Should I just focus on practicing other things or is the subjunctive crucial to speaking Spanish?
3 Respuestas
Should I just focus on practicing other things or is the subjunctive crucial to speaking Spanish?
It all depends on your goals. If you want to communicate no matter what, and you don't mind speaking like this as long as they understand you, then you don't need the subjunctive:
- He want picture. Picture be beautiful. Me sell me picture.
Depending on the conversation, Subjunctive appears in 20% - 80% of the sentences, so if you don't learn it, you are going to be extremely limited in what you can say without making grammatically incorrect sentences. Extremely limited!!!
For example, all that I've written so far, in Spanish, would have used the subjunctive twice so far. I think it is a big mistake to try to avoid the subjunctive, and leave it for advanced level only. It would be like trying to teach someone how to drive a car, but don't teach how to use the steering wheel until this person can use the gas and the brake to move forwards in a very long straight road (for beginners), which would be the kind of subjunctive-free questions teachers use to stick to a simple "use gas and break only" approach. In practice, rather sooner than later, you'll have to turn, and you'll have to use the subjunctive... or ignore all the traffic signs and hope that everyone gets out of the way, or you can stop the car in time.
Crucial? Well, you tell me. No one is going to kill you if you make a grammatical mistake for not using the subjunctive, and they'll probably understand you most of the time (as in "He want picture", which is perfectly understood).
My guess is that the present subjunctive is used at least 5 times more than the future tense in Spanish, so if I had to prioritize...
I think all parts of learning the Spanish language are crucial per se. I think that if you just ignore it and move on, it may help you to learn other things, but you will eventually have to come back to it, and it could end up becoming a big issue later on as you learn other conjugations. That's my opinion, but the choice is up to you!
Learning the endings (conjugations) is a simple question of "brute force" memorization. The real problem is choosing between the indicative/subjunctive in a given sentence/clause.and this is a problem because it depends on your intention.Your intention, in turn depends on how you view the world (or, more specifically, what you are trying to say) Spanish speakers (or, for that matter, speakers of any other language) do not view the world in quite the same way that English speakers do (even within a given language, there is not universal agreement about such things as the use of the subjunctive).. If nothing else, it is useful to be able to recognize the subjunctive (when you hear/encounter) it, even if you can't use it appropriately, yourself.
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