and there was much gnashing of teeth at the preterite tense

Tomorrow is the last day of my intensive Spanish course, and not a day too soon. It's been a good review for basic mechanics of Spanish, but overall it's been a mildly frustrating course. I say mildly because I've had full-fledged frustrating classes before where I want to cry and poke my eyes out, but this has mostly been a course where I pout because it's not MY learning style, and everything should be tailored to MY needs. Hmph!

I learned Spanish the same way I learned English. People spoke it at me and I picked it up. I never had a formal Spanish grammar class until 7th or 8th grade, almost ten years after I had been babbling away en español. Formal grammar classes are awful. All of a sudden you are confronted with these weird rules that make you second-guess how you speak. I didn't really realize why it was hard for me until this class.

As an example to my English-speaking friends, say you had been speaking fluent English for a long while and then someone tried to teach you the appropriate way to make a prediction. For example:
"Where was Maren last night?"
Depending on your pattern of speech, you could answer this one of several ways:
"She was blogging"
"She blogged"
"Wasn't she blogging?"
"She had been blogging"
"I think she blogged"
"She would have been blogging/would have blogged"

Or when talking about a past action:
"I went to the café"
"I had gone to the café"
"I had been going to the café"
"I had been at the café"
"I go to the café"

While all of the aforementioned answers would get your point across, some are more correct than the others, depending on your level of doubt, how close the prediction is to the present, if the action had been anterior to another action, whether it was a continuing or closed action, if it was a descriptor, etc. Intelligent beings though you all are, I don't know if any native speaker who has not studied grammar extensively can answer how to form any given sentence or clause absolutely correctly every time.

So, because I was not taught these rules, remembering them off the cuff when I'm taking a test is difficult. It's like when people ask me the difference in English between "who" and "whom"--in the vernacular they are interchangeable but if my life depended on the correct answer I would just tell them what music I wanted at my memorial service. I know the rules when presented with them, but when writing I find myself ambivalent towards my immersion education--on the one hand, I am presented with no language barrier when I'm in real-world Spain, but I get my tests back with less than perfect grades because I just could not remember what constitutes as a continuing action in the past and what constitutes as a closed one (I know I sound stupid, but it's harder than you think).

Plus sides are: I am not failing the course, my speech is still good, and if I look pathetic enough while I study Juani makes me ice cream sundaes.

On Monday I start an advanced grammar course and an oral course. Both may make me growly, but I promise I will mostly post pictures of beautiful things and tell you all about how great Spain is (although I get more time to enjoy it when there are no tests)

Hasta luego,
Maren