Upgrade Your Spanish

Abigail Lee Six

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138469051
• eBook ISBN: 9781317858850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Upgrade your Spanish is the ideal guide for students wanting a better grade in their Spanish exams. It offers a thirty day revision programme that is guaranteed to improve your results. In the countdown to exams, students should simply spend between 30 minutes to an hour a day with this book, and see their mark go up a grade!This short revision guide focuses on three key strategies for improving your exam results: 1) Eliminating basic errors and slips of the pen; 2) Increasing and consolidating your vocabulary; 3) Moving on from school-book Spanish.

Never forget another agreement!

DAY 1

Do you ever forget to make your adjectives agree? Most students do. Here are some exercises to help you remember without fail, and some to give you practice at checking your work effectively by training your eye to spot forgotten agreements.

AGREEMENTS FOR GENDER

Not all adjectives have a different form for masculine and feminine. Here is a basic list of the ones that do:

▶Those that end in -o in the masculine change to -a in the feminine, e.g. bonito [pretty] becomes bonita.

▶Those that end in -dor in the masculine change to -dora in the feminine, e.g. hablador [talkative] becomes habladora.

▶Those that end in -án, -ín, -ón or -és in the masculine, change to -ana, -ina, -ona, -esa in the feminine (NB: no accent in the feminine endings), e.g. holgazán [lazy] becomes holgazana, pequeñín [tiny] becomes pequeñina, besucón [liking to kiss] becomes besucona, and francés [French] becomes francesa.

Add the correct ending to the following:

¡No seas tont_, María!
Don’t be silly, María!

Teresa es gorda porque es tan comil_ _ _.
Teresa is fat because she is so greedy.

Pilar es muy parlanch _ _ _.
Pilar is a real chatterbox.

AGREEMENTS FOR NUMBER

The basic rule is that adjectives ending in a vowel add s; adjectives ending in a consonant add -es. If there is a written accent on the last syllable of the adjective, remember that it will often lose it when you pluralize because you will have added a syllable to the end of the word (e.g. inglés becomes ingleses). Don’t touch an accent anywhere else, though. Stress rules will be covered more thoroughly on Day 8. Adjectives ending in z will change it to c before adding es (e.g. voraz [voracious] becomes voraces), but you will have a chance to think about spelling changes like this again on Day 24.

A few adjectives do not have a plural form; often this is because they are really nouns. An example is naranja [orange]. This is too complicated to go into here. However, a good idea in these cases is to turn the phrase around, so, for example, to translate ‘orange flowers’, say flores de color naranja.

To get agreements right every time,

▶first make any agreement necessary for gender;

▶then pluralize if required.M

Thus, to describe mujeres [women] with the adjectives inteligente [clever] and bonito [pretty]:

Step 1 Make each adjective feminine if it has a feminine form: inteligente + bonita – (inteligente does not end in -o, so there is no change for the feminine form).

Step 2 Make each adjective plural. Both end in a vowel so both just add s: mujeres inteligentes y bonitas.

Complete the following adjectives:

Mis hijas son muy trabaja _ _ _ _ _.
My daughters are very hard-working.

Tengo que darte noticias important _ _.
I have to give you some important news.

Estos ejercicios son fácil _ _.
These exercises are easy.

Now practise your checking strategy

Read the following passage, imagining you wrote it yourself in an examination and are now checkin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Day 1: Agreements
• Day 2: Describing People
• Day 3: Easy Subjunctive Constructions
• Day 4: Accents, Part I
• Day 5: Politics and Current Affairs
• Day 6: Regular Verbs
• Day 7: Visual Arts
• Day 8: Accents, Part II
• Day 9: Literature
• Day 10: Ser and Estar
• Day 11: Geography
• Day 12: Time
• Day 13: Rhetorical Signposts
• Day 14: History
• Day 15: Radical-changing Verbs
• Day 16: Music
• Day 17: Dependent Prepositions
• Day 18: Cinema
• Day 19: Irregular Verbs
• Day 20: Education
• Day 21: Conditional Sentences
• Day 22: Health
• Day 23: Dialogue
• Day 24: Spelling Changes
• Day 25: Science
• Day 26: Imperatives
• Day 27: Similes and Set Expressions
• Day 28: Minor Points
• Day 29: Vocabulary Test
• Day 30: Grammar Test
• Progress Chart
• Answers to Exercises
• Index