Qualitative (descriptive) adjectives - Hillcrest Elementary

·1· The basics
18
Grammar
Dei nite articles 19
Indei nite articles 22
Yo tengo..., yo quiero... 25
Está, the “is” of location 28
The use of hay 30
Standard orthographic changes 36
Cracking the gender code 37
Vocabulary
Family and friends 20
The animal kingdom 22
Around the house 25
Some basic words 26
The numbers 0–10 27
Está 28
Words of location 28
Items in and around the house 31
Vocabulary building
The diminutive sui xes -ito
and -ita 35
No matter what great endeavor a person takes on—whether it’s building a house,
starting a new company, going on a space mission, or learning a foreign language—that
person must, before anything else, deal with the basics. h at is what
we are going to do in this unit.
It’s only much later in the process that a person can get creative and put his
or her personal stamp on something. Even the most abstract painter—think of
Jackson Pollock—must start out with a fundamental understanding of art, balance,
line, and color. Albert Einstein had to learn basic algebra like everyone else
(he just did it a lot faster). And Shakespeare had to learn to spell C-A-T along with
the rules of grammar.
Somewhere along the line, hucksters and charlatans have tried to sell us on
the idea that learning a foreign language is easy and fast: Stick a language CD into
your car’s stereo system and by New Year’s Eve you can party with the locals in
Acapulco!
h is simply isn’t the case. Learning Spanish (or any foreign language) is a
lengthy and arduous process that requires great commitment. It is also enormously
rewarding, with both short-term and long-term benei ts—the latter being your
ability to navigate with ease those places and situations that require speaking
Spanish. Short-term rewards include your ability to pop into Spanish-speaking
situations, as well as understanding and appreciating your native language in a
new and brilliant light. h ese rewards increase with each word you learn.
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