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1 thought on ““Oh, I Gotta Write This Down!””
Supercool: TPR with the subjunctive. It seems so obvious (not that I have tried it, but don’t you think it is a natural extension?).
I refer to stuff like the subjunctive as “formerly tricky structures.” It seems intuitive to me not to go down that road of technical info that detracts from the meaning of the message and the story line.
Just this week I had a fabulous visitor in class, a 20-something guy who is fluent in a bunch of languages. He is a great friend, and boy does he need some edu-ma-catin’ in language acquisition. He’s like a 1%-er. Anyway, there he was in my level 2 Spanish class talking to kids about the amazing people he knows in the DR and Haiti, and he was introducing the famous Juan Luis Guerra song “Ojala que llueva cafe.” So the first thing he does is write the title on the board and ask the kids: “Have you guys done the subjunctive yet?” Talk about a buzzkill. So not compelling to the average 16-year-old. I was like, dude, that is so last century. I said “They don’t need to know that term; just tell them about ‘ojala’ and they’ll know what it means.” He may be young and hip, but he is old and crusty when it comes to language classes!