Peter Corrected Me at Dinner: Explaining Your Own Why
Okay. Last time we worked on fixing the tense you keep picking wrong, the specific one, the mistake that's yours and nobody else's. Today we're doing something a little different. We're going to explain the why.
Here's the thing that happened. Peter, my fourteen year old, corrects me at dinner sometimes. He's at that age where he's fluent enough to catch me and cocky enough to enjoy it. One night I said something with the wrong past tense, I don't even remember what, and he goes "Mom, it's supposed to be [whatever the correct one was]" all smug about it, like he just won something.
And he was right. That's the annoying part.
So I made him explain why. Not just "that one's right," but why, what's the actual reason the imperfect goes there and not the preterite. And he got about halfway through and just kind of stalled out. He knew it was right because it sounded right. He didn't actually know the rule underneath it.
And I told him, that's fine, that's actually how it's supposed to work, but if you can get to the why, you stop guessing and start knowing. So we did it together at the table, food getting cold, working out loud through why his sentence needed imperfect. We were even by the end. He got humbled a little, I got a good teaching moment out of it, everybody won.
That's what today is. You've got both tenses working now, mostly. This lesson is about being able to say why you picked the one you picked, out loud, to another person, on the spot. Not because a chart says so. Because you understand what the sentence is doing.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it does
You can get pretty far in this class just developing a feel for it. Preterite feels like this, imperfect feels like that, and eventually you're right most of the time without being able to explain it. That's actually a fine place to end up. I'll be honest, most fluent speakers can't explain their own grammar either, they just know.
But right now, while you're still building the habit, being able to explain your why catches mistakes before they turn into muscle memory. If you always guess right by accident, great. If you guess wrong sometimes and can't say why, you'll keep guessing wrong in the same spot forever. Peter's the proof. He'd been saying it right for months. The second I asked him to explain it, I found out he didn't actually have it, he'd just gotten lucky a bunch of times in a row.
How to practice this at home
You need a partner for this one, even if it's just for five minutes. A spouse, a kid, a roommate, doesn't matter if they speak Spanish or not.
- Tell a short story, three or four sentences, mixing both tenses. Anything. What you did this morning is fine.
- Stop after each sentence and say, out loud, in English or Spanish, why you picked the tense you picked. "I said 'estaba' there because it's the background, the thing that was already going on." "I said 'llegó' there because it's the one thing that happened, the plot point."
- If you can't explain it, that's your flag. Go back, look at the sentence, figure out what it's actually doing. Is it scenery or is it the event? That's usually the whole question.
- Have your partner ask "why" back at you like Peter did to me. Doesn't matter if they don't speak Spanish, they just have to be annoying about it. "But why though?" Works every time.
If you don't have a person handy, record yourself on your phone telling a thirty second story, then play it back and pause after every verb and quiz yourself. Less fun, works fine.
A caution on this one
Don't let this turn into grammar paralysis. I've had students get so worried about explaining the why correctly that they stop talking altogether, and that's the opposite of the point. My opinion, and I'll stand by it, grammar serves conversation, not the other way around. You explain the why so you can talk faster later, not so you can win an argument about verb tenses at a dinner table. If you're mid-story and you can't remember the technical reason, just keep going. Circle back to the explaining part after.
Also, a heads up, if you ask a native speaker to explain their why, a lot of them will do what Peter did. They'll know it's right and go blank on why. That's normal. It doesn't mean they don't know Spanish, it means grammar terminology and actual fluency are two different skills, and you're building both at once, which is harder than it sounds.
Before next time
Try the dinner-table thing this week, with whoever's around. Tell a story, stop yourself mid-sentence, say out loud why you picked the tense you picked. If you get stuck, that's not a fail, that's exactly the spot we want to find. 💛