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Picture this...

Mrs. Campos, (fictitious Spanish teacher), stands up and says, Today, we're going to learn the Imperfect Past Tense. Your eyes widen, your mouth quivers, your knees buckle and your heart sinks. Why? Because the very thought of all this grammar stuff runs against your very nature.

Think about it, how many of us today opened our mouths to speak and after uttering some words of great significance, thought, Wow, I am a language genius, I just used a Periphrastic Future. or.. That was cool, I just created a Past Unreal Condition with a special touch of the Subjunctive Mood.

Let's face it, the only thing this will do for you as a learner is confuse you. Maybe you have already experienced this and you know exactly what I am talking about. Many people would call this a grammar based approach to learning Spanish.

Forget about tenses and conjugations!

Language is not about tense, it is about time! It is all about the expression of time. This is where the The Power of Patterns comes in.

Every sentence in Spanish is made using a group of words, and placing those words into what I call a pattern. There are 15 different principle patterns in both Spanish and English. In other words, there are primarily 15 different ways to use the same words, thus allowing you to express 15 different elements of time.

In fact, you can create equivalents and line these patterns up side by side in English and Spanish. It is kind of an x = y scenario. This, by the way, is a very, very helpful thing to do for new learners or people who have not mastered structure yet. You just have to know how they exactly match up. You'll understand this concept more as you move through the book.

Here is how patterns work...

Take the words to walk, to, and the restaurant. I can use these same words to express 15 different things. I can say, I walk to the restaurant, I am walking to the restaurant, I am going to walk to the restaurant, I have been walking to the restaurant, I was walking to the restaurant, I was going to walk to the restaurant, and so on. In other words there are 15 different ways to express time.

Here's an interesting observation. In both English and Spanish, there are three ways to talk about things in the future, two ways to talk about things in the present and 10 ways to talk about the past. Language tends to be evolutionary. Because people tend to talk so much about their past, we have invented many different ways to talk about our past.

Let's go back to the concept of putting words in patterns. When you can take words and put them into any of the 15 principle patterns, you can make sentences — lots and lots of them!

When you can make sentences, you can string some together and make paragraphs. If you know how to pronounce the words in patterns, you can make verbal paragraphs, which means you can make conversations with people. And, of course, when you are listening to native people speak, they are only doing the same thing; putting words into patterns.

This is very powerful so please pay close attention here.

Let's say you have 2000 words you can interchange in any way you want into 15 different patterns.

How many sentences could you make?

Take 2000 to the POWER of 15. This is 2000 times 2000, then that number times 2000, then that number times 2000, etc. This is BILLIONS of sentences, amigo. This is the power of combination. Learn to use words in lucidly within the 15 major patterns and you will be able to quickly and effectively make BILLIONS of sentences.

Think about the color wheel.

The three primary colors of red, blue and yellow, when combined in different ways, allow us to enjoy thousands and thousands of different colors. This again is the power of combination. The power of combination is absolutely incredible and if you master 2000 words and 15 patterns you will be painting some very impressive scenes in your Spanish communications!

The idea is that you learn to paint for yourself, not simply make a copy or do some sort of dot to dot type of communication.

Being able to put sentences together for yourself sure beats struggling in conversations, or worse yet, being limited to parroting memorized dialogues as many do in a lot of Spanish courses and classes. Talking about María and Lupe getting a taxi in Guadalajara will not cut it in real life!

Let's pretend you just bought a brand new house with a walk-in closet in your bedroom. It is just an empty room with nothing in it. Will you move in and throw your clothes on the floor or will you consider a hanging system first so you can hang them in an orderly fashion? Obvio, that is Spanish for obvious. That is all we are doing. Before you learn a bunch of words and have no place to put them, you need to have a place to put them — a hanging system. This only makes good, logical sense.

Several years ago I developed a learning tool called The Real Spanish Path. The Path allows the average person to become comfortable with 12 of the 15 patterns within an average of 6 to 8 hours.

All Bilingual America students work with The Path before learning any new vocabulary. It is an incredible process. In around six to eight hours of learning the average student is comfortable with roughly 70 percent of the entire structure of the Spanish language!


Please click on Chapter V, You're Not a Native — All About Immersion, in the left-hand navigation to continue.