This unit challenges and guides students with more difficult material. Songs, poems and demanding newspaper articles broaden and intensify their knowledge of the culture of the Spanish-speaking world. We also exemplify some of the differences in usage and the different ways that Cubans, Argentinians, Mexicans and Spaniards refer to common items. The important differences between word order in Spanish and English, and the consequent complications for translation, are explored. Attention is given to word formation in Spanish so that students can easily recognize related words and how the use of suffixes (diminutive, augmentative and pejorative) can change the meaning of the basic word in subtle and unexpected ways.

Listening activities are identifiable within the units by the listening icon to be found next to the exercise in question. There are two sections in each unit that contain the majority of the Listening exercises: the Presentación y prácticas and the Comprensión auditiva.

This unit challenges and guides students with more difficult material. Songs, poems and demanding newspaper articles broaden and intensify their knowledge of the culture of the Spanish-speaking world. We also exemplify some of the differences in usage and the different ways that Cubans, Argentinians, Mexicans and Spaniards refer to common items. The important differences between word order in Spanish and English, and the consequent complications for translation, are explored. Attention is given to word formation in Spanish so that students can easily recognize related words and how the use of suffixes (diminutive, augmentative and pejorative) can change the meaning of the basic word in subtle and unexpected ways.

The advice here is to help you to establish good habits regarding Spanish pronunciation, word stress and intonation from the beginning. More advice and further guidance on producing vowels and consonants are to be found under Pronunciation in Part Three: Reference Tools and Study Aids. The recordings are to be found after those for the units.

This unit introduces students to the subjunctive (as opposed to the indicative) mood for all verbs. The subjunctive is used in subordinate clauses following certain expressions in the main clause. This unit focuses on the present subjunctive and expressions which indicate the future, doubt or uncertainty, and includes the conjunctions ojalá and que. These grammar elements allow students to express future plans and possibilities. Written passages and audio recordings support them with examples of correct usage, and a comparison of acronyms in Spanish and English helps them to avoid common pitfalls.

This unit introduces the conditional and the conditional perfect tenses, the forms of which are built on those of the future tense. These tenses allow students to describe hypothetical places and put themselves in hypothetical situations, saying what they would have done. The presentation of the passive voice, and how to avoid it in Spanish, provides extra tools to help students when expressing themselves. A linkage between a recipe, a humorous poem and historical racial issues in Spain provides interest and serious cultural comment. The complications posed by phrasal verbs and the differences between the use of prepositions with verbs in Spanish and English are highlighted.

This unit introduces students to another very important past tense (preterite), with the forms of the regular verbs, the radical-changing verbs and some of the many irregular verbs. This tense is used to express time-limited actions and events in the past, and the unit explains and explores through exercises the contrast with the imperfect, where such limits are barely registered. The sequencing and ordering of events and actions in the past can be effected using the preterite; and relevant time phrases frequently associated with this use are explained and practised.

Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) express modality in the verb through mood morphology. Mood morphology is most common in verbs appearing in subordinate clauses. The semantics of the verb of the main clause or the proposition can determine whether the verb of the subordinate clause takes subjunctive or indicative. For learners whose first language does not have subjunctive mood grammaticalized, acquisition of all the meanings and variable uses of subjunctive in Romance languages is a very difficult task. Chapter 6 discusses studies of second language acquisition showing that the meanings and uses of subjunctive are acquirable with very advanced proficiency. The second part presents instructed intervention studies of the subjunctive in Spanish and other languages that have targeted beginner and intermediate English-speaking learners. The vast majority of the intervention studies on the subjunctive have been conducted to test the effectiveness of the Input Processing approach to language teaching.

This unit deals with asking the way and giving directions, further practising prepositions to describe locations. Students learn to distinguish between saber and conocer and are introduced to the present tense of some irregular verbs, namely dar, ir, tener, coger, torcer and seguir. They are also shown how to express obligation or necessity with hay que and tener que.

This unit develops students’ knowledge of the present tense in conjunction with reflexive pronouns and verbs to talk about people’s daily routines. It also introduces them to telling the time in Spanish, the days of the week and relevant time phrases and adverbs to indicate frequency of activities. In this context, the verb soler, to express habitual actions, is useful.

The numbers 200, 300, and so on, have to agree with the gender of the noun to which they refer.

Camino al español was conceived originally as a language course that would take students with no previous knowledge to approximately the level required for university entrance in the UK. We also saw it as suitable for ‘fast track’ learning, for example, for university students or their equivalents who needed to establish the linguistic basis for advanced study of the language. In terms of the levels proposed in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), we felt confident that students who completed the course could achieve levels B1/B2. The carefully structured units provide opportunities to master the Spanish language by developing listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, and to gain an awareness of the varieties of Spanish across the world.