Hola! Welcome back to part 2 of the
Rocket Spanish 6 Day Course!

This is the second lesson in the Mini Course, and it is designed to help you make sense of the grammar and vocabulary you learned in the previous audio lesson.

The complete Rocket Spanish package includes a variety of materials to supplement each audio lesson, including a book of common conversational phrases and a “Beginners Book” explaining the grammatical concepts. However, for now, this part of the course will fill in the gaps between the audio lessons.

Here’s the conversation that you learned in the last lesson..

This is such a basic conversation that you’ll have it over and over again! So it’s worth the time to study. Here is the conversation a second time, except in English.

Formal vs. Informal Modes of Address

When you are greeting someone you already know, hola, or hello, is a perfectly acceptable greeting. However, Latin Americans are often more formal than their American (norteamericano) counterparts. If you are meeting someone that you don’t know, use the more formal, “Good morning,” or, “Good afternoon.”

It is even more polite to add a formal title afterwards, like

Greeting More than One Person

When you have to greet more than one person at a time, don’t think that you’ll get away with a big buenos días to the whole group. In many parts of Latin America, you will be expected to greet everyone individually. That means a lot of shaking hands and a lot of Buenos días-ing!

How are You?

It’s only polite to ask how people are doing. In Spanish, the most common way that this is done is by saying...

Let’s look at this question part by part. First, notice the upside-down question mark at the beginning of the question. All questions in Spanish start with an upside-down question mark and end with a regular question mark. Exclamations follow the same pattern. For example…

Notice the accent marks as well (ó, é, á). In Spanish, accent marks tell you to stress a certain syllable or vowel sound. For example, the words estás and estas are pronounced completely differently. They’re also completely separate words! (Estás means “you are,” while estas means “these.”) That is why it so crucial to always include accent marks when you’re writing Spanish.

Now, let’s get into the content. The word cómo means how. The word estás means are you (or you are). You may wonder how one word in Spanish can mean the equivalent of two words in English. Let me advise you now: this will happen all the time! Sometimes one word in English will require two words or more in Spanish, or vice versa. That’s why it’s important not to get caught up in making literal, or word-by-word, translations. (Which is also why online translators, even those that claim to translate sentences, often return incorrect answers!)

Spanish allows you to include the subject of a sentence inside the verb by modifying the verb slightly. It does this through conjugations. Conjugations are too complex to explain here on your very first lesson, but if you plan to learn more than the most basic Spanish, you will become very, very familiar with verb conjugations!

Formal vs. Informal Modes of Address Part II

One of the other strange things about Spanish is that you have a choice about whether you are going to address another person respectfully or familiarly (e.g., informally). There are actually four words for “you” in Spanish!

Right now, the important thing to realize is that the question, “How are you?” can change according to which “you” you wish to use. If you’re asking a single person how he or she is, you’ll choose between one of the following.

The first question is the one used in the conversation above between me and my friend Amy. Since we’re friends, we use the informal mode of address. If, however, I was addressing someone I’d never met before or someone older than me, I would have said,

¿Cómo está usted?

It means exactly the same thing, except that this way it imparts much greater respectfulness and politeness.

No, Really, HOW are You?

If someone asks you, “¿Cómo estás?” you have a variety of responses you can use. Here are some of the most common.

Whoops! I guess it isn’t terribly common to say that you’re bored (nor polite, for that matter). But just in case you’re sitting in a boring Spanish class, and your teacher asks you how you are, you’ll be ready with a great retort!

¡Hasta la Próxima!

Well, that’s it for today’s lesson. In your next email, you’ll receive the next audio lesson. You’ll learn how to introduce yourself to someone in Spanish, how to say where you’re from, and how to explain just how much Spanish you know.

Hasta luego!

Mauricio Evlampieff
Rocket Spanish

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About the Authors:

Originally from Chile, Mauricio Evlampieff is a native Spanish speaker who is passionate about his country’s culture, language and heritage. He is best known for his enthusiasm and insights into the language of his homeland, and has shared this love of the Spanish language and culture with students the world over. His product contains a complete interactive audio course designed to get you speaking conversational Spanish in the quickest time possible. You’ll receive four e-books crammed with grammar lessons, useful words and phrases, vocabulary, exercises, and more! It doesn’t end there. You'll also receive the Rocket Spanish MegaVocab, MegaAudio, and MegaVerbs software-based learning gamess, which you can modify to suit the vocabulary that YOU need to learn. Together, this dynamic and comprehensive Rocket Spanish package will completely transform how you think about learning another language.

Amy Waterman became fluent in Spanish while living and working in the Andes Mountain region of Ecuador. Her extensive experience in Spanish learning systems led her to formulate the concept behind the Interactive Audio component of Rocket Spanish.