Catriona: ¡Buenos días! Welcome back to A Zero to A Hero.

Héctor: ¡Hola a todas y todos! How’s your Spanish going, Catriona? Quite good, for what I can see. 

Catriona: I hope so, I've been practicing. I've been using what we've been learning, doing little bits everyday, so not a huge amount but little chunks, just to refresh it everyday. So hopefully is making a difference. 

Héctor: OK, and are there any topics in particular that are causing you trouble?

Catriona: Well we mention last time that conjugations can be a little bit tricky as well, so verb conjugations, that would be. Could we brush up that today?

Héctor: Yes, conjugations in Spanish can be tricky sometimes, there are so many irregularities.

Catriona: Exactly, I mean with things like “yo soy”, I'm guessing is obviously not “tú soy”. When I'm putting the pronoun name, when I don't have to, maybe just a sort of clarification of all that again.    

Héctor: There’s plenty to discuss on today’s episode!

Catriona: Yes and I think to be able to have a conversation properly with people, to say a little bit more than verbs in different contexts, so conjugating is definitely a must.  

Héctor: OK, so you're ready to fight the Conjugation Monster?

Catriona: ¡Lista!

So obviously at Babbel a common conversation topic is surprise, surprise, languages. What languages does everyone speak? What are you studying just now? and so on.

Héctor: Those are two good verbs to start with…

Catriona: To speak and to study?

Héctor: Yes, “hablar” and “estudiar”. 

Catriona: “hablar, estudiar”. 

Héctor: Exactly, those are two of the most common regular verbs in the Spanish language.

Catriona: OK, and maybe at this point our listeners might not be too familiar with regular and irregular verbs. Maybe you could explain what that is, Hector?

Héctor: Of course, this is a way of classifying verbs according to their conjugation. Let’s take the verb “to accept” in English as an example. We have the root, “accept”, and if we want to conjugate the verb in the third person, we would say…

Catriona: He or she accepts.

Héctor: Exactly, so we keep the same root and add the conjugation, which in this case is letter “s”. In contrast, the verb “to have” is irregular because when we conjugate it in the third person, we get…

Catriona: He or she has.

Héctor: And here, the root  “have” , changes completely. Fortunately, for people learning English, most verbs in English are regular in the present tense, but not so in Spanish. As we have learned in previous episodes, every person has its own conjugation.

Catriona: That's true, with the verbs “to be”: “ser” and “estar”, I pretty much had to memorize the conjugations.

Héctor: Yes, with irregular verbs, such as “ser” and “estar”, it is hard to run away from memorization definitely.

Catriona: So, let’s dive into the rules for regular verbs, shall we?

Héctor: Yes, first we have to understand how verbs appear without conjugation.

Catriona: Like “ser” and “estar”?

Héctor: Yes, this is what we know as the infinitive form.

Catriona: OK, so “estudiar” and “hablar” are also infinitives.

Héctor: Yes, infinitives normally have three endings: “-ar” as in the verbs we already mentioned, “hablar”, to speak and “estudiar”, to study. The other endings are “-er” as in the verb “comer”, to eat and “-ir” as in the verb “vivir”, to live.

Catriona: OK, this is probably quite a lot to get through, so maybe for today we should just focus on the conjugation of the infinitives in “-ar” verbs.

Héctor: OK. Fair enough! So following our previous episode, we will keep training our inductive skills for which I will give you an example and you will have to extract the grammar rule, alright?

Catriona: Excelente.

Héctor: The first example is “yo hablo español”.

Catriona: Yo hablo español.

Héctor: So, how do we conjugate regular verbs ending in “-ar” for the first person, “yo”?

Catriona: OK, so it comes from “hablar” to “hablo”, so we've taken off the ending and replace it with an “-o”.

Héctor: Yeah! You drop the ending, “-ar”, and add “-o”: “hablar, hablo”. Notice the change in the intonation: “hablar, hablo”. 

Catriona: hablar, hablo. 

Héctor: ¿Qué idioma hablas, Catriona?

Catriona: Yo hablo inglés.

Héctor: So, what was the question again?

Catriona: ¿Qué idioma hablas?

Héctor:  “Tú hablas inglés”. What’s then the conjugation of regular verbs ending in “-ar” for the second person, “tú”?

Catriona: So again, it drops the ending and replace it with “-as”, so “as”.

Héctor: Exactly! Drop the ending, “-ar”, and add “-as”. “Hablar, hablas”.

Catriona: Hablar, hablas.

Héctor: ¿Qué idioma estudias, Catriona?

Catriona: Estudio español.

Héctor: Well done.

Catriona: And what happens with “él” and “ella”?

Héctor: OK, let me give you an example. The example is: “él habla portugués y ella habla francés”.

Catriona: “Él habla portugués y ella habla francés”. OK so we've taking the ending off again and just replaced it with an “-a”.

Héctor: OK, do you know which languages those are? 

Catriona: Portuguese and French.

Héctor: Yes, as you can see, even when we have never learned those words, you can understand them through context. We are talking about languages and you would take the knowledge from your native language and use it in your target language. 

Catriona: Very true, so if I look back quickly to what I’ve learned so far, I remember that for “nosotros” we had “somos” and “estamos” for the verbs “ser” and “estar”, so I'm assuming the conjugation of verb “hablar” for “nosotros” is “hablamos”. Am I right?

Héctor: Impressive. “¿Qué idiomas hablamos nosotros, Catriona?”

Catriona: Hablamos inglés y español.

Héctor: So the rule is…

Catriona: You remove the ending “-ar” and replace it with “-amos”. So, that's not too hard. “Hablar, hablamos”.

Héctor: Very good and do you know the conjugation for “vosotros”?

Catriona: Not really…

Héctor: The example is: “vosotros habláis italiano”.

Catriona: OK, “vosotros habláis italiano”, so we take it off and change the ending to “-áis”.

Héctor: Very good!

Catriona: OK, please tell me that the conjugations for “ustedes”, “ellos” and “ellas” they are all the same…

Héctor: It is, as a matter of fact! “Ustedes hablan italiano”.

Catriona: Ustedes hablan italiano.

Héctor: Ellos y ellas hablan alemán.

Catriona: Ellos y ellas hablan alemán.

Héctor: Very good.

Catriona: OK and to help me have a conversation later how do I say: what does something mean?

Héctor: ¿Qué significa?

Catriona: ¿Qué significa “alemán”?

Héctor: “Aleman” significa “German”.

Catriona: Perfect. “Ellos y ellas hablan alemán”.

Héctor: Very good!

Catriona: Héctor, we have reviewed different languages but I would like to learn a few more.

Héctor: Time for El Tesauro?

Catriona: I think so.

Catriona: So, here in Berlin, I sing in a choir and coincidentally almost everyone else is Danish.

Héctor: That is super sweet, I didn't know that.

Catriona: I dabbled a little bit in learning bits of Danish and maybe after my Spanish, I will go back to that, so how do I say: “I’m studying Danish?”

Héctor: Estudio danés.

Catriona: Estudio danés.

Héctor: Yes, notice here. Sometimes the correspondence between verb tenses is not going to be one on one. So, if we were to translate this it would be “estoy estudiando danés”. OK, but since you are normally talking about a habit, something that you do regularly, you would say: “estudio danés”.

Catriona: OK, “estudio danés”. Perfect and I also wanted to ask about another language so my team at work is all Polish apart from me and often I feel left out of conversations, so I think I should start learning some Polish. So, how can I say that I speak Polish?

Héctor: Do you speak Polish?

Catriona: Not yet, but …

Héctor: OK. “Hablo polaco”.

Catriona: “Hablo polaco”.

Catriona: And, I guess I always found Dutch appealing, since it’s supposedly easier if you already got English and German as a base, so how would I say that I want to learn Dutch?

Héctor: This is quite interesting, in normal conversation it's very common that at least in Mexico that you would listen “hablo holandés” because the Netherlands is called Holland, which we know is not accurate. The name of the language would be “neerlandés” or “flamenco”. So now here it would be interesting to see if people actually know the language that you are taking about. That would be interesting to know, of course they know the country and the language diversity in the Netherlands is very complex, very interesting to see but well, we have then three words:  “holandés, neerlandés y flamenco”. 

Catriona: “Holandés, neerlandés, flamenco”. OK. Maybe I will leave that one to last because I can forget quite quickly. 

Héctor: Good that we point it out, some languages also match the nationality sometimes, for example: “él habla español, él es español”. For nationalities you have also to be careful to match the gender: “español” and “española” for males and females respectively. So if you start learning vocabulary that is related to language you will find out that you're getting more because you're also learning nationalities. 

Catriona: Very true. Excellent. Killing two birds with one stone. Well, Héctor I think its time that you quiz me on what we've done so far. 

Héctor: So for this quiz, I will give you a sentence in English and you have to translate it into Spanish. Sounds good?

Catriona: ¡Vamos!

Héctor: I speak Italian.

Catriona: That would be “hablo italiano”.

Héctor: Very good.

Héctor: You speak French. You singular.

Catriona: So, “you” singular, “tú”: “tú hablas francés”.

Héctor: Very good. I like your “francés”, your Spanish pronunciation. OK, we can just point out here the difference in latinamerican pronunciation would be “francés”, having the same pronunciation with letter “c” and “s”, “francés”, and the Spanish pronounce it “francés”. Very good.

Catriona: I'll be all over the place after this.

Héctor: No, it's OK because then you notice that people understand and you will also have linguistic diversity it gives something to the mix. 

Héctor: OK, the next one: she studies English.

Catriona: Ella estudia inglés.

Héctor: Very good.

Héctor: We speak Spanish.

Catriona: So: “nosotros, nosotras hablamos español”.

Héctor: You study Portuguese and this would be the “you” plural for Latinamerica and Spanish.

Catriona: OK, so that's “ustedes estudian portugués”.

Héctor: And european Spanish?

Catriona: The european: “vosotros vosotras estudian portugués”.

Héctor: “estudiáis”.

Catriona:  “estudiáis”, very true. Ah, failing on my quiz.

Héctor: Ah just first mistake. Don't worry.

Héctor: So for the last one of this part of the quiz: they speak German and study Spanish.

Catriona: Ellos, ellas hablan alemán y estudian español.

Héctor: Very good.

Catriona: Gracias. 

Héctor: OK. So now we are going to do out little role play. Are you ready?

Catriona: I am ready. 

Héctor: Buenos días.

Catriona: Buenos días, Héctor.

Héctor: ¿Cómo estás, Catriona?

Catriona: Estoy bien, ¿y tú?

Héctor: Muy bien, también gracias. Catriona, me enteré que hablas muchos idiomas. ¿Qué idiomas hablas?

Catriona: Muchos no sé, pero hablo un poquito de español, hablo italiano, francés y alemán e inglés.
 
Héctor: ¿Estudias algún otro idioma?

Catriona: Estudio también danés pero no lo hablo mucho, el danés. Y tú Héctor, ¿qué idiomas hablas tú?

Héctor: Yo hablo español naturalmente, hablo alemán, inglés, un poquito de francés, un poquito de italiano y ahora estudio griego.
 
Catriona: Vale también muchos idiomas.

Héctor: Me gustan mucho.

Héctor: OK, very good. How did you feel?

Catriona: Not bad, Héctor. I think it's getting there we're becoming a little bit more fluent together so that's good. I mean, I'm becoming more fluent. You're Spanish is particularly good, to begin with.

Héctor: Sometimes it's not so fluent to be honest. I would really like to congratulate you on your progress, Catriona! This is the episode where you have spoken Spanish the most!

Catriona: It's definitely improving, I think its helpful just to have the option to practice and definitely put it intro practice and use it. That's probably the best tip is to carry on using it in real-life situations if you can. 

Héctor: Don't be afraid of mistakes.

Catriona: Very true, I make them everytime. 

Héctor: OK so on the next episode we’ll continue with more engaging topics to learn and practice verb conjugation.

Catriona: Yes! I'm looking forward to this so I can begin to speak about many many topics.

Héctor: I would like to encourage our listeners to contact us via email at podcasting@babbel.com. You can write A Zero to A Hero in the subject and we’ll try to address all your comments and suggestions.

Catriona: Remember to subscribe to A Zero to A Hero wherever you get podcasts and leave a review!

Héctor: Thanks for listening! ¡Adiosito!

Catriona: ¡Adiós!