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Why the subjunctive is late, and why it is not optional
The subjunctive is the reason a great many learners stall at exactly this point, and it is worth understanding both why it feels disproportionate and why there is no way round it. It feels disproportionate because English has almost lost its own. What remains is fossilised — if I were you, be that as it may, I insist that he be present — and no English speaker thinks of those as a system. Spanish has a full one: two tenses in ordinary use, both past and present, appearing in perhaps one sentence in five of natural speech. So a learner arrives at it with no intuition to build on and a suspicion that it must be formal or literary. It is neither. It is what a bar conversation is made of. The good news, and it is genuinely good, is that the forms are nearly regular once you have the yo-form rule from this lesson. Spanish irregularity is concentrated in the present indicative and the preterite, both of which year 1 already taught you; the subjunctive inherits those irregularities rather than adding new ones. Six verbs stand outside the rule — ser, estar, ir, haber, saber, dar — and after that the work is not memorising forms but learning which expressions trigger the mood. That is the real content of the next three lessons, and it divides into three groups worth naming now. Wishes and influence, which is this lesson: querer que, esperar que, aconsejar que. Doubt and denial, which is lesson 58: no creo que, dudo que. Emotion and value judgements, which is lesson 59: me alegra que, es importante que. Later come purpose at 60, negative commands at 63, and time clauses at 70 — and by then the pattern is familiar enough that each arrives as one more member of a family. One practical reassurance. Getting the mood wrong almost never makes you unintelligible: quiero que vienes is wrong and perfectly clear. What it does is mark you as a learner, in the way a missing article does in English. So use it as soon as you can, accept that you will get it wrong for months, and do not let the fear of it stop you saying what you want. Espero que te guste is a good first sentence to own outright.