¿Y ahora qué? — And Now What?

What you have, what you do not, and what closes the gap

This is the last lesson of the second year, and the right place to take stock honestly before going on. First, plainly, what you have. You have met the entire Spanish tense system, both moods and every trigger the subjunctive has, the pronoun system including the pairs, the whole apparatus of subordination, and somewhere around two and a half thousand words in context. You have Peninsular Spanish as it is actually spoken, with the reductions of lesson 93 and the vosotros of lesson 92, plus enough awareness of Canarian, Andalusian and American Spanish not to be thrown by them. You can hold a conversation about something you care about, disagree without giving offence, ask about a difficult subject, write an email that does not embarrass you, and read a newspaper with effort. That is a solid B2, and on a good day parts of it look like more. Now what you do not have, since a course that flatters you at the end has wasted the honesty it built up. Speed: you will still lose the thread when three people talk at once, or on a bad phone line, or when somebody is angry. Stamina: an hour of Spanish is tiring in a way an hour of your own language is not, and that is what Alex means by aguante. Range: outside the subjects you have practised you will run dry quickly, and you will notice yourself steering conversations towards what you can say. And specialist registers — legal, medical, academic, technical — of which these two years have given you almost nothing. What fixes those is not more grammar, and this is the one piece of advice the whole year has been building towards. Volume of contact, over time, with real Spanish aimed at Spanish speakers. Concretely: talk to people for longer than is comfortable, at least weekly, and preferably to somebody who will not switch to English — an intercambio, a tandem partner, a class in something else conducted in Spanish, a regular phone call. Read whole books rather than articles, because length is what builds stamina, and reread one you know in English first if that helps. Listen to things made for natives: podcasts, radio, television with the subtitles off and the willingness to miss things. Write something every week and have somebody correct it. And if you can manage it, spend time in Spain — three months of ordinary life there will do more than any twelve months of study, because the language stops being a subject and becomes the thing you do everything else in. If you want a certificate, the DELE from the Instituto Cervantes is the standard one, it does not expire, there are sittings several times a year, and the SIELE is its faster online cousin. A B2 certificate is a requirement for some jobs and some university places, so it is worth having if you need it and worth nothing if you do not. Do not treat it as the finish line; it certifies where you already are. One last thing, about the year rather than the language. A hundred and four lessons ago Alex could not order a coffee, and the person asking him the question in this dialogue is the same person who watched him fail to do it. Everything in between — the arguments about paella, the Catalan bookshop, the ferry, the emptying village, the grandmother's photograph, the referee being whistled at — was there because a language is not a system you install but a country full of people who will correct you. You now have enough Spanish to be corrected usefully, which is the whole point, and the instruction for whatever comes next is the one Diego gives: ahora toca usarlo. Quedamos el jueves.