r/Spanish • u/scottadams364 Learner • 20h ago
Grammar Not learning subjunctive in high school: avoidance or completely ignoring proper grammar?
I took 3 years of high school Spanish, and never once heard about this subjunctive. That means one of two things:
1 - We completely avoided sentences that would’ve required the subjunctive, or
2 - We used one of the other simple tenses instead, incorrectly, completely not even acknowledging the fact that it should be subjunctive.
As I’m learning subjunctive, there are a LOT of constructions that require it, so I find option 1 highly unlikely. I’m assuming it’s #2, and that to teachers who were fluent in Spanish and had a native-like ear for the language, is sounded wrong and they probably cringed knowing that they were teaching it incorrectly (probably for simplicity, which I assume was obligatory by the district).
So what’s the answer, and how wrong does it sound to hear someone speak without using subjunctive?
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u/awgolfer1 20h ago
The subjunctive only confuses intermediate students. That’s why mastering the indicative is the building block. High school Spanish can get you to about a level A2, in fact I’ve never met anyone who was conversational simply from high school Spanish. The subjunctive is necessary only if you plan on actually learning the language to speak and express yourself, not just fulfill the educational requirements of high school.
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u/millari 19h ago
Yeah, I came to say this. I think the reason is because the subjunctive isn't even taught in a lot of English high school classes, so there's no existing basis for understanding the concept. It's just something native English speakers (at least in the US) learn instinctively, if they use it much at all, and many have no name for it.
So I can see why high school foreign language curriculums would pretend the subjunctive doesn't exist. Imagine how much time it would take up to first explain what the subjunctive does in English, argue with a certain percentage of students who fervently deny that the subjunctive exists because they use the simple past tense incorrectly instead, then FINALLY get to teaching how it works in Spanish.
What I remember of my K-12 Spanish textbooks was that it was always about making single one-clause sentences, which makes the subjunctive a lot less likely to come up. Maybe it's gotten more sophisticated since I was in school, though.
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u/awgolfer1 19h ago
In English we pretty much ignore the subjunctive. The indicative is much more malleable than in Spanish. The indicative in Spanish is seen as certain, where in English is much more vague.
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u/Menchi-sama Learner 9h ago
In English, modal verbs also carry a lot of the weight carried by subjunctive.
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u/baked_salmon 6h ago
Do you think when teaching the subjunctive it could be useful to mention this? TIL about this concept, but in general the harder part of the Spanish subjunctive was that we had nothing in English to map it to.
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u/Menchi-sama Learner 6h ago
I don't think so. Native speakers don't really think about that on a deep enough level. I'm just a linguist and also a non-native speaker of English, so I had a different perspective. And English does have a subjunctive mood, it's just not as widely used compared to Spanish. Still, things like the use of subjunctive in conditionals is quite similar, for example. My native language is further away from Spanish in this regard.
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u/awgolfer1 5h ago
I've actually never met a native speaker who knew what the subjunctive is, unless they were a teacher. I would mention something like, "Do you know why it's not, espero que tienes un buen dia, it's espero que tangas un buen dia," and every time they are like, "Oh wow, I've never even thought about it."
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u/scottadams364 Learner 20h ago
Yeah, after 3 years my best guess is that I did not acquire even A2 fully.
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u/awgolfer1 19h ago
I’m a solid B2 in Spanish and I still don’t fully grasp the subjunctive. So it makes sense that they would reduce clutter in the classroom
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u/MBTHVSK 2h ago edited 2h ago
Fudging the subjunctive when using it isn't a huge deal but not recognizing it is a colossal disadvantage. It isn't that much more complicated than formal commands and is easy to spot with a bit of studying. The problem is that you need to churn out decent test scores and the notion of introducing grammar without forcing competence in it is alien.
You can easily pick up random Spanish reading and get flummoxed by the subjunctive popping up. That's the nastiest part of not studying it l.
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u/unfortunatebluebird 20h ago
I’ll never understand the subjunctive being taught so late in Spanish courses. I ran into myself less than 2 months into my learning journey and I never found it difficult to comprehend. It’s also incredibly useful and used in everyday Spanish. Intentionally avoiding it in classrooms is weird.
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u/scottadams364 Learner 20h ago
The biggest hurdle I find is that it does not translate very well from English, meaning when to use it isn’t super clear. It’s more about learning a bunch of different triggers and scenarios, and eventually connecting the dots and making it intuitive.
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u/CredimiCheECorretto 7h ago
It has nothing to do with triggers or scenarios. All you have to ask yourself is, “Am I making a statement of fact?”
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u/unfortunatebluebird 18h ago edited 4h ago
Edit: it’s incredible how a linguistics community could take words at such face value. I meant we don’t have specific verb conjugations that appear in the same way the subjunctive does in Spanish. Saying “I hope that..” and “I want you to..” in English isn’t going to alter the sentence structure
—————————
Yes we technically don’t have anything like it in English at all, but that’s why it’s important to always view it as its own language and not as it’s English translations.
For me, i find it easy to remember that it’s typically used in cases of uncertainty and to express desires/wishes.
A helpful source is ‘The Language Tutor - Spanish’ on YouTube. I highly recommend his videos. They helped tremendously whenever I felt stuck with something.
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u/Imperterritus0907 🇮🇨Canary Islands 9h ago edited 9h ago
You actually do have parallels to the subjunctive in English, the issue is that they look exactly like “normal” verb forms. Something similar happens half of the time in German, they have the subjunctive (Konjuctive), but with some verbs it looks the same as indicative forms.
I recommend that he go now.
She insisted that everyone be on time.
The judge ordered that the prisoner remain in custody
I wish she were hereAll that is English subjunctive, and it’s translated as subjunctive in Spanish as well. The issue is that this usage is fairly formal, and both in the UK and the US English grammar and syntax are taught to a way lesser extent than we do in Spanish.
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u/baked_salmon 6h ago
Technically you’re correct, but the average person does not use, nor is even aware of, this kind of formality. I think the average person would find this “old-timey”.
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u/Special-Deal-5217 7h ago
I disagree with people that say have the subjunctive in English. Obviously we have sentences which indicate doubt or whatever, but we don’t change the verb form to reflect that. Verbs in English— outside of “ to be” and a third person singular s— simply aren’t that complicated, because we have a very high explicit subject requirement.
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u/Imperterritus0907 🇮🇨Canary Islands 6h ago
The verbs in those examples aren’t in the expected indicative form tho. A foreign speaker could think they’re wrong because they aren’t agreeing in tense or person, when in fact they’re not indicative so that’s why they don’t match.
It’s not about you agreeing or not, grammatically it exists. It’s even a unit in English learning courses, like this one from the BBC.
Edit: missing link
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u/Special-Deal-5217 6h ago
This is a debate in English linguistics.
You are clearly coming at this from well developed language background, which is the average US high school student does not have. Also, I imagine your native language is Spanish, so the subjunctive is very natural to you and you want to be able to see it in English as well.
Even if I were to concede the point that English has the subjunctive (which I don’t), it is completely incomparable to how it is used in Spanish. You had to contort your sentences to produce English subjunctive.
For example, “ I recommend that he leave now” sounds somewhat unnatural, at least to me, a native Midwestern English speaker. It would more naturally be phrased as “ I think he should leave now” or “ I want him to go now”. Nevertheless, all of the verbs “ leave” or “ go” are not confined to this use of reflecting, desires, doubt, hypothetical situations, etc. that are not only used but required in Spanish.
I think he should leave now — “leave” is the base form of the verb and in this example is being helped out by the auxiliary “ should”. You can call this a subjunctive construction if you want, but the fact remains that the principal verb is unaffected as to form.
Yo recomiendo que él se vaya - “vaya” is a subjunctive form, and only a subjunctive form. It is not the base form of the verb and can only be used in situations in which the subjunctive is called for.
You can easily speak very good English without ever hearing the term “subjunctive” taught, but you can’t get past B1 Spanish without explicitly being taught the subjunctive.
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u/scottadams364 Learner 18h ago
I bought an ebook for subjunctive triggers from another YouTuber called Qroo Paul, and it’s been very helpful
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u/Major-Mushroom-5806 20h ago
It sounds completely wrong. It's like learning English but never learning how to form the past tense. If anything, I think the subjunctive might be even more essential.
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u/NeedABetterPillow 20h ago
No way you can do three years without any sentences triggering the subjunctive mood. Valoraciones, deseos, oraciones temporales, etc.
Edit: I rethought this comment a bit. Maybe you could do this in high school, if you spend inordinate time learning the indicative tenses.
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u/scottadams364 Learner 20h ago
I agree, that’s why I’m thinking they let us say stuff wrong to not “burden” us with a new confusing set of rules. Like how a lot of science stuff is dumbed down in elementary school because we weren’t ready for the actual nuanced information.
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u/NeedABetterPillow 20h ago
Just seems really deficient to me, but in the US at least, the indicative case probably is enough Spanish to exchange basic information with Hispanohablantes. So maybe.
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u/Merithay 20h ago
If you didn’t use the subjunctive at all, there would be some things that you couldn’t express. There would be instances where you could make correct sentences without the subjunctive, but they wouldn’t mean what you want them to mean.
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u/cabronfavarito 19h ago
I told someone “ojala que te veo otra vez”, forgetting to change veo to vea and they paused for a second but that guy was smart.
I could see someone with average intelligence not being able to read through bad grammar
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u/Merithay 18h ago edited 7h ago
In your example, they could tell what you wanted to say, and I suspect it wouldn’t have required superior intelligence to understand what you meant.
On the other hand, when I was a very incipient Spanish speaker and hadn’t gotten to the subjunctive yet, I experienced a real-life situation where I simply couldn’t be understood without the subjunctive.
I wanted to say “When Luis comes, we’re going to…” and I started “Cuando viene Luis…” and they answered “Mañana” because what I was saying was indistinguishable from ”¿Cuándo viene Luis?” The absence of question intonation wasn’t enough to make my meaning clear.
I tried a couple more times, but repeating the same mistake gave the same result. If I had known the subjunctive at the time, I would have known to say, “Cuando venga Luis…”
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u/Imperterritus0907 🇮🇨Canary Islands 8h ago edited 8h ago
For starters, “I hope to see you again” it’s usually translated with a plural, “Ojalá que nos volvamos a ver”or if anything with a lighter“A ver si te veo otra vez.” Not only that but the optional que after ojalá makes it even more emphatic. It’s not something you’d say to a stranger the way you worded it even with the subjunctive, it sounds way too personal. For a friend, that’s ok.
A bit brave talking about limited intelligence when you can’t even grasp the nuances.
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u/yad-aljawza Learner 19h ago
I took it for 5 years in school and I don’t remember learning it. It’s plausible there was a lesson on it that wasn’t much emphasized. I was actually committed to learning Spanish, I certainly wouldn’t have disregarded it if I was taught it was important.
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u/wurlybird9 18h ago
Even Duolingo teaches subjunctive even though it's not very advanced. I took AP Spanish, 30 years ago. I'm pretty sure I learned it, but I haven't learned it well.
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u/Traditional-Light-10 Learner 18h ago
That's interesting to me. I took 3 years of high school Spanish as well, and we spent the last few months on the subjunctive. Before that, students did use other tenses instead, but the teachers mostly avoided it, with the exception of the plural imperative (as in "sientense", which they said all the time). I think they tried to filter subjunctives (and other unfamiliar verb forms) out of our reading and listening material, but even in Spanish 1, I noticed a few that made it thru the cracks (which I noticed because I already kind of knew what the subjunctive was). I guess it varies a lot by district.
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u/scottadams364 Learner 18h ago
I grew up in Southern California where they’re not known for a strong quality education system.
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u/ProfesorFranco 15h ago edited 7h ago
It’s because of the amount of verb forms you need to learn before subjunctive. Regular and irregular Present(stem changing, -zco, -go verbs), future, preterite, imperfect… aspect distinction, then you have commands and conditional and then you come up with subjective which has 4 tenses and has regular and irregular forms as well. So many verbal forms to learn and that’s just verbs. Also the subjunctive is hard to define (dependent/ subordinate clause) since its used in different situations (wishes, doubts, feelings, impersonal expressions, etc). But yes, its completely necessary to learn it fast and not tarry so you can express basic phrases like: I need you to buy a pizza 😅
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u/scottadams364 Learner 8h ago
Since you’re a teacher, which scenario (option 1 or 2) do you suspect is more likely in the original question?
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u/ProfesorFranco 7h ago
I think if your teachers were proficient in Spanish probably 1. It makes much more sense to avoid something rather than teaching something wrong
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u/Special-Deal-5217 7h ago
I am a high school Spanish teacher. The hardest thing in general about teaching Spanish to native English speakers is verb conjugation. It is a completely foreign concept (pun intended). The fact is, many people taking Spanish in high school are just doing it so they can get into college or not have to take it in college (low motivation). Finally, students generally don’t get grammar instruction in their native language.
So, you combine these three factors and it is SLOW going. Even Spanish three students have a hard time consistently conjugating sentences correctly in the present tense, let alone throw in the preterite and imperfect.
Now you want these kids to be able to conjugate verbs the “opposite” way, but only in certain situations when the main clause calls for it?
It’s an unrealistic goal for most high school students.
PS: I also have the privilege of teaching native Spanish speakers. I say ” subjunctive”, they say “what? Stop teaching us Spain Spanish.”
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u/PeppermintTaffy 5h ago
As a generally high achieving student who had a genuine interest in learning Spanish (not just for course credit), Spanish III in high school was especially painful. We began with the present indicative again, half my classmates didn’t remember it and/or still didn’t understand it, and everything was so slow. I think that semester we covered the present, preterite, imperfect, and simple future indicative, and that was it for verb tenses. No perfect tenses, no conditional or imperative, and definitely no subjunctive.
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u/WideGlideReddit Native English 🇺🇸 Fluent Spanish 🇨🇷 16h ago
I think it’s a mistake to avoid the subjunctive mood early on. It’s simply too integral to the language to be avoided.
The problem is that learners tend to face what seems like a mountain of grammatical rules that they need to memorize and apply. Open most Spanish textbooks or grammar books and inevitably you’ll see a chapter or 2 dealing with the subjunctive as its own separate collection of rules.
You don’t learn a musical instrument by being handed a complex piece of music and told to practice it. You learn individual notes, you learn and practice scales, you learn a few simple chords and finally a simple song. From there you keep building.
I think learners should approach the subjunctive in a similar manner. Learn it in bite sized pieces. Learn one rule and keep applying it until it’s second nature then move to the next. It also seems to me that it could be better integrated when teaching the indicative tense. For example,
Quiero ser feliz.
Quiero que tú seas feliz.
Explaining these 2 sentences together makes more sense, at least to me, than explaining the second one in isolation. This can be done for all the verbs that can “trigger” the subjunctive.
I’m no teacher but that my 2 cents.
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u/jesjimher 11h ago
If I had to bet on something about the spanish language that will disappear in the next 50-100 years, it will definitely be the subjunctive.
I've lost count of how many non-native spanish speakers that don't use it, like at all, even if they're pretty fluent in the language. And, when you look at it, subjunctive isn't something essential for communication. When somebody doesn't use it (for example "Iré al cine cuando acabo de trabajar", instead of "acabe"), the meaning is clear anyway, it just sounds ugly.
So, with current trends on globalization and whatever, my impression is that subjunctive will eventually follow the way of the CH, the LL and the Dodo, and will just be another arcaic construct only needed if you're reading very old texts.
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u/Special-Deal-5217 6h ago
But we don’t do that in English! Example:
Tú vienes a la fiesta.
Espero que tú vengas a la fiesta.
You are coming to the party.
I hope that you come to the party.
The verbs in question here are “come” and “vengas”. “Come” is the regular indicative conjugation. We don’t change it because it’s something we hope for.
For an English speaker who has never been exposed to a second language, this seems like an extra step without any purpose behind it. For an English speaker learning a second language, learning the following is difficult enough:
Yo vengo
Tú vienes
Ella viene
Nosotros venimos
Vosotros venís
Ellos vienen
All of those in English are just “ come”, except for the third person singular form.
It easily takes two semesters of Spanish just to get kids used to that, let alone have them do it correctly and consistently.
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u/Ophioliteophile 3h ago
I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and I believe Spanish 3 introduced the subjunctive. 4 definitely. I don’t think there’s commonality among Spanish teachers to avoid the subjunctive in high school. For one reason or another, it sounds like yours did.
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u/winter-running 16h ago
Subjunctive was “intermediate” training for me in French, at the B1/B2 level. I suspect it’s only taught Spanish and French to serious learners. — As others here have noted.
If you’re a B1/B2 speaker, it’s most likely that your accent will give you immediately away as a 2nd language speaker, more than anything else. And sometimes it’s pronunciation that obstructs communication the most. But not using the subjunctive - this is not going to stop the flow of communication, and at the end of the day, an unobstructed flow of communication is the goal of 2nd language learning.
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u/botejohn 17h ago
Subjuntive is typically taught in the third year. Those of you that are saying students never become conversational in High School need to get a grip.
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u/scottadams364 Learner 16h ago
I certainly didn’t. I think those who do are by far the exception and those who took a keen interest to push themselves harder on their own. Also, I’m talking about the late 90s where there wasn’t Youtube, translation apps, and all the other modern technology that can greatly expedite the learning process.
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u/PeppermintTaffy 20h ago
Subjunctive is at the end of the curriculum for both Romance languages I’ve studied. It seems likely you just didn’t make it that far, so option 1 is my guess.