December 08, 2013

Early Intermediate Spanish Podcast 23 – Saying Morning in Spanish and other Time Markers.

11 minutes

Morning in Spanish.

Knowing how to say morning in Spanish is absolutely vital for any student of the Spanish language along with all of the other words that allow you to mark time within your sentences.

The reason that it’s so important has been brought home to me loudly and clearly during the English classes that I teach here in the UK.

What I have noticed is that, for beginners and intermediate learners, being able to be quite specific about time frames is vital if they want to be understood.

You see, if you are a beginner or an intermediate speaker, there’s a high chance that when you speak Spanish you get your tenses a little mixed up. Perhaps you think you are talking about an event in the past when in fact you are using the present tense.

And, of course, the same thing could apply when you are talking in the present or the future and you inadvertently use a past tense conjugation.

What saves your bacon every time is if you use the correct time marker in your sentence.

Mixing up tenses.

Consider this sentence, which is very commonly heard pouring from the mouth of many a beginner in any language.

Yesterday morning I am going to the town centre. = Ayer, por la mañana, voy al centro.

Now, we know that this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The key is, however, that because the sentence mentions yesterday morning, then as a listener we can make the appropriate tense adjustments in our head.

e.g.

I went to the town centre = fui al centro

If the speaker got the time marker wrong, however, or left it out, we as a listener would have absolutely no idea whether the speaker was going to go or had already gone to the town centre.

And that’s why it’s important to be able to say morning in Spanish, as well as afternoon, evening, tomorrow, yesterday, next week, last week and so on and so forth.

By having this vocabulary, which isn’t at all difficult, you can worry far less about your tenses and still let people know whether you are talking about the future or the past.

The truth is, if you are not confident about any tense other than present, you can still talk in the past. Many people do! (Believe me.)

How to get round weak conjugation.

Look at these examples:

Mañana por la tarde estoy en la casa de mi madre. = Tomorrow afternoon I’m in my mum’s house.

Ayer por la mañana estoy en el trabajo. = Yesterday morning I’m in work.

Now, there are better ways of saying this but because of the time markers, we as readers and listeners know when these things happened or are going to happen.

In this podcast we talk you through the most important ways of identifying time frames in your conversation. Join us and start taking your Spanish to new levels of clarity and understanding.

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The post Early Intermediate Spanish Podcast 23 – Saying Morning in Spanish and other Time Markers. appeared first on Lightspeed Spanish.

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By Gordon & Cynthia Smith-Duran

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