Language & Culture lessons very hard (Spanish)

Dear all,

I would like to know if you guys are also struggling with the Language & Culture lessons (I am in module 1 so far). While the interactive audio lessons are very well structured and are building up, the language & culture lessons are often very hard. 

For example lesson 1.10 (about articles el/la/los/las/un/una/unos/unas) suddenly uses verb forms other than present.
 
This is totally new content and therefore it's impossible to get it right when doing flashcards. Obviously by repeating it many times you will memorize it. But since the goal of this lesson is to understand the articles (which is well explained), you lose a lot of time just because of grammar that has not been explained yet at all.  In order to understand the usage of articles it's unnecessary to use a new tense.

How do you guys tackle this kind of lessons? Do you keep on trying until you get every flashcard right (that's my goal), or do you move on since you perfectly understand the goal of this lesson? Or what do you recommend? I am sure the above verb form will be content of a future lesson.  Eventually it will be much more efficient to wait rather than spending hours on new and unexplained grammar.  This can be very frustrating.

Thanks
Simon

follow up question:

Meanwhile I have found out that salieron is Pretérito perfecto simple. Why did you not use salíen -->  Pretérito imperfecto, which is the equivalent to "went"?

¡Hola Simón91!

Thank you very much for your question and your feedback!

We are currently undertaking a review of the Spanish courses and odd quirks like these (where verb tenses that have not yet been taught are being used) are one of the things that we are working on removing, to avoid the kind of frustration that you describe. I have made sure that the phrases that the you have described have been removed, and they are due to be replaced with more appropriate ones.

Our apologies for the inconvenience these sentences have caused! 

As for salieron (in the pretérito) and salían (in the imperfecto), both could be translated as "went"; this is a rather complex topic that is best left for when you get to the lessons on these past tenses. You can find these at the start of in Level 2: here for the pretérito, and here for the imperfecto.

Muchas gracias otra vez,

Liss