Unit 0 · Before you begin
Before you begin
You don't need to know anything about Spanish, and you don't need to have read Don Quixote. This unit gives you both: enough about the book and the world it came out of to know why you'd bother, and enough about the sound of Spanish to start Lesson 1 without feeling lost.
What Don Quixote is, and why it still matters
A middle-aged country gentleman in La Mancha reads too many chivalric romances (the airport thrillers of 1600, full of knights, giants and enchanted castles) and one day decides they are true, and that he will go be one. He digs his great-grandfather's rusted armour out of a corner, gives his bony horse a heroic name, recruits a neighbouring farmer as his squire by promising him an island to govern, and rides out to right the wrongs of the world. The world, which is a dusty road in central Spain full of pig herders and innkeepers, does not cooperate.
That premise is four hundred years old and it still works, for a reason that has nothing to do with literary prestige. Cervantes was the first writer to notice that comedy and heartbreak are the same event seen from two distances. Up close, a man attacking windmills is an idiot. Step back, and he is the only person in the book who thinks anything is worth doing. Every joke in Don Quixote is built on that double exposure, and jokes built that way don't go stale.
The book is also, physically, funny. People fall off things. There is a great deal of vomiting, beating, and being tossed in a blanket. Cervantes was writing for a broad, loud, largely illiterate public who heard books read aloud in taverns, and he wrote to keep that room's attention.
And then there is Sancho Panza. The novel really begins the moment the knight acquires a talkative, hungry, sceptical companion who argues back. Two people walking and talking, disagreeing about what is real. Half of everything since, from buddy comedies to road movies, is downstream of those conversations.
The opening sentence gives you the tone immediately, including the shrug in the middle of it:
«En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.»
In a village of La Mancha, whose name I don't care to remember, there lived not long ago a gentleman of the sort who keeps a lance in the rack, an old shield, a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
A narrator who can't be bothered to remember where his own story is set. That's the voice you're going to learn Spanish from.
Who Cervantes was, in four paragraphs
He was poor his whole life, and it was the specific poverty of a family with pretensions. His father was a barber-surgeon, the sort who bled patients and set bones. He kept moving the household from city to city ahead of his debts, and was once jailed for them. Cervantes grew up watching a man of supposedly good birth fail to make a living, which is exactly the situation of the hero he would invent decades later.
As a young man he went soldiering in Italy and fought at Lepanto, the enormous naval battle against the Ottoman fleet. He was sick with fever below decks and insisted on being carried up to fight anyway. He took three gunshot wounds. One destroyed the use of his left hand for the rest of his life. He was proud of this until he died, and said so in print. Whatever else you think about Don Quixote riding at windmills, the man who wrote him had actually got up off the sickbed and gone at the enemy.
Sailing home with letters of recommendation in his luggage, he was captured by Barbary corsairs and taken to Algiers. The letters convinced his captors he was important, which raised his ransom out of his family's reach and kept him there five years. He organised four escape attempts. All four failed, all four were his responsibility, and each time he took the blame in front of the men who could have had him impaled for it. He was ransomed at the last minute, on a ship about to sail for Constantinople.
Back in Spain, the war hero could not get a decent post. He requisitioned grain and oil for the Armada, a job that meant confiscating food from villages and being hated for it, and he did the accounts badly enough to end up in prison in Seville. It may be that he had simply banked with the wrong man. He was somewhere near sixty, with a lifetime of failure behind him, when the first part of Don Quixote appeared and made him famous across Europe. It did not make him rich. He wrote the second part, better than the first, as an old man, and died a few days after finishing his last book.
The Spain of 1605 where all of this happens
What a hidalgo was
Don Quixote is an hidalgo, and the word has no English equivalent. It means the lowest rank of nobility: legally noble, exempt from certain taxes, entitled to be addressed with respect, and frequently broke. The catch is that nobility in Spain came with a prohibition. A nobleman could not work with his hands or engage in trade without losing his status, which was the only asset he had. So the typical hidalgo owned a house, a scrap of land, a sword, and a coat of arms, ate badly, and did nothing all day. Cervantes tells you in the first paragraph how the household budget goes on meat, eggs and lentils, and that most of it goes on food. Don Quixote has enormous amounts of free time and no purpose whatsoever. That's why he reads. That's the whole engine of the book.
What a venta was
Not a hotel. A venta was a roadside inn out in open country: a walled yard for the animals, a well, a kitchen fire, and a straw loft where travellers slept several to a room, or several to a bed. You brought your own food if you had any sense. Ventas are where nearly everything in Don Quixote happens, because a venta is the one place where a muleteer, a runaway noblewoman, a barber, a soldier and a madman are all forced into the same room at night.
Why the roads were full of odd people
Spain in 1605 was an empire running out of money, and its roads carried the consequences: soldiers coming back from Flanders and Italy with no pension, students walking between universities, muleteers moving everything the country ate, galley slaves being marched to the coast in chains, priests, actors' companies, shepherds moving flocks along ancient droving routes, con men, and pilgrims of varying sincerity. Nobody travelled for pleasure. Everyone on that road had a story and a reason to be somewhere else, and Cervantes lets a startling number of them stop and tell it.
How this course works
The Spanish level climbs with the novel. You begin at absolute zero, and the text climbs with you.
The three stages
In the early lessons you read the story rewritten in short, plain sentences: present tense, common words, one idea per line. You are reading Cervantes's story, not yet his sentences. In the middle stretch the rewriting gets lighter: longer sentences, past tenses, Cervantes's own vocabulary kept wherever it isn't in the way. In the final stretch you read the original text with almost nothing touched. A footnote where a word has since changed meaning, and nothing else. Nobody hands you a seventeenth-century sentence in week two.
What a lesson looks like
Every lesson has the same five parts, in this order:
- El textoThe passage of the story, in Spanish, with English on hand.
- PalabrasAround ten to fifteen new words, chosen because they recur.
- La gramáticaOne grammar point, drawn from something you just read rather than from a syllabus.
- PracticaShort exercises: fill the gap, choose the form, put the sentence back together.
- EscuchaThe passage read aloud in Spanish from Spain, first slowly, then at normal speed.
Time
A lesson takes about 30 to 40 minutes done properly. Three or four a week is a realistic pace for an adult with a job. You'll take longer over the grammar in the early units and longer over the reading in the late ones. Doing one lesson a day for a fortnight and then nothing for a month works far worse than three a week, forever.
The Spanish you'll learn: Spain's
This course teaches the Spanish of Spain, because the book is Spanish and read aloud in a Spanish voice. That decision costs you nothing anywhere else, and it's worth being clear about why.
Vosotros
Spain uses a plural "you" that Latin America dropped: vosotros for a group you're on familiar terms with, ustedes for a group you're being formal with. Latin America uses ustedes for both. So you'll learn one set of verb endings that a learner of Mexican Spanish won't: vosotros habláis, vosotros tenéis. This is a small extra cost with a large payoff, because vosotros is everywhere in Cervantes and everywhere in Spain.
The c and z sound
In most of Spain, the z of zapato and the c of cielo are pronounced like the English th in think. In Latin America and in the Canary Islands and much of Andalusia, they're pronounced like an s. Both are entirely standard. You'll hear the Spanish version here. If you later prefer the s, you simply stop doing it, and nothing else in the language changes.
Two or three things that will surprise you later
Spain says coche for car, Mexico and much of America say carro. Spain says ordenador for computer, America says computadora. And in Argentina and Uruguay you'll meet vos instead of tú, with its own verb forms, vos tenés rather than tú tienes.
None of this is a barrier. A Spaniard and a Peruvian understand each other completely. The gap between Madrid and Bogotá is smaller than the gap between Glasgow and Alabama, and it's mostly vocabulary for cars, food and slang. What you learn here works from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.
Ten Spanish words you already know
English has taken these straight from Spanish. The pronunciation guide is approximate. Stress the syllable in bold, and give every vowel the pure sound described in the last section.
| Spanish | Pronounced | In English |
|---|---|---|
| siesta | see-ES-ta | siesta, an afternoon rest |
| plaza | PLA-tha | plaza, a town square |
| patio | PA-tyo | patio, and in Spain an interior courtyard |
| cargo | KAR-go | cargo, though in Spanish it means a load, or a post you hold |
| armada | ar-MA-da | armada, literally "armed [fleet]" |
| bonanza | bo-NAN-tha | bonanza, fair weather at sea, then good fortune |
| mosquito | mos-KEE-to | mosquito, literally "little fly" |
| guerrilla | ge-RREE-ya | guerrilla, literally "little war" |
| embargo | em-BAR-go | embargo, a seizure or impediment |
| aficionado | a-fee-thyo-NA-do | aficionado, someone who is keen on something |
You also already own fiesta, tornado, cañón (canyon), rancho, vainilla and huracán. Reading the list is not the same as knowing the words, but it does mean your starting vocabulary isn't zero.
How Spanish sounds
Spanish is written the way it is said. Once you know the rules on this page, you can pronounce any Spanish word you have never seen before, including names and words you don't understand. English does not offer this. Enjoy it.
The five vowels
Spanish has five vowel sounds and only five. Each letter has exactly one, always, in every word, stressed or not:
| a | as in father | casa (house) |
| e | as in bet | mesa (table) |
| i | as in machine | libro (book) |
| o | as in for, cut short | como (I eat) |
| u | as in rule | mucho (a lot) |
Why this matters so much: English has around twenty vowel sounds and slurs most of them into a vague uh whenever they're unstressed. Say "banana" and listen to what happens to the first and last a. Spanish never does this. The a at the end of casa is the same full a as the one in the middle. Keeping every vowel clean and short is the single change that makes an English speaker suddenly intelligible in Spanish.
The jota (j, and g before e or i)
A rasp made at the back of the throat, like the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach, harder than an English h. Jamón (ham), hijo (son), gente (people). If you can't produce it yet, a strong breathy h will be understood.
The two r sounds
A single r between vowels is a quick tap of the tongue, very close to the dd in American ladder or the tt in butter. Pero (but), caro (expensive). A double rr, or an r at the start of a word, is the trilled one: perro (dog), rosa (rose). The difference is real. Pero and perro are different words. The trill takes weeks for most people. Nobody will misunderstand you meanwhile.
Ñ
The sound of ni in onion or ny in canyon. Señor, España, año (year). Note that año (year) and ano (anus) differ only by that tilde, so it's worth getting right.
Silent h
The letter h is never pronounced. Hola is "OH-la", hombre is "OM-bre", hay is "eye". It sits there for historical reasons and makes no sound at all.
Where the stress falls
Words ending in a vowel, n or s are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: ca-SA, ha-BLA-mos. Words ending in any other consonant are stressed on the last: ha-BLAR, ciu-DAD. Any word that breaks those two rules carries a written accent showing you where to go instead: ja-MÓN, Á-gui-la. The accent isn't decoration. It's an instruction.
Con esto basta. In Lesson 1 you'll meet the gentleman with the lance in the rack, and the first Spanish sentence you read will be about him. He is about to make a decision that no reasonable person would make. As he says later, when someone tells him he isn't who he thinks he is:
«Yo sé quién soy.»
I know who I am.