The Subjunctive for the Imperative - Part III

We now have a handle on the imperative in both its affirmative and negative forms. We’ve also taken a look with our students at why these forms came to be the way they are. Once we’ve worked a little with exercises and we’ve seen, for example, the importance of placing the pronoun after the command when it’s a positive command (maintaining the notion which from the beginning lead us to the most compact form possible) and before when it’s negative, then we can dive right into the topic we’ve been concerned with all along: the present subjunctive.

So let’s get straight to it! All Spanish teachers know that the word “subjunctive” often strikes panic in our students. For many students, for most of them I’d say, the topic is one of those seemingly insurmountable barriers that they must hurdle to advance in their mastery of the language. Their feeling that this is an impossible challenge presents an obstacle for us as teachers, an obstacle that we want to free ourselves as soon as possible.

The first thing I do when I first write the terrible word “Subjuntivo” on the board is tell students not to worry about it, that we’ll first just look at the morphology of this new tense and mode…whispers in the classroom and voices begging for mercy as you hear “wait what, more irregular verbs!”

That’s when, with a self-assured grin on our lips and a silence hanging over our frightened group, we calmly say: “but you already know the present subjunctive form!” Jaws drop and eyes widen in disbelief. The teacher-guru goes on, now with all his magical knowledge laid bare: “You do indeed! The present subjunctive is always the same as the polite imperative and the negative…” They can’t believe it.

And now comes the best part: showing them how they can understand, even if just on a surface level, the subjunctive’s function.

Start by asking the group “what’s the first thing that goes through a person’s head when they give an order using the imperative?”. Then write on the board:

Dar una orden significa...
Expresar un deseo, que pretende influir en otra persona, pero que no es seguro que lo cumpla, sólo es probable. Además, siempre se produce en el futuro, Lo que la conecta con la idea de posibilidad, con la hipótesis. Y, en muchos casos, tiene forma (o sentido) negativo.

Seems pretty logical, right? Also, to highlight the notion of negation we can ask “what circumstances do we give an order in, even if it’s positive?” The answer “when we don’t like a situation and we want to change it”. That’s the idea, the negative sense of giving an order, whether it’s positive or negative.

Then we offer the following affirmation: the subjunctive is like a teenager who can’t be alone, who needs a friend to take him to the communication party. That’s why the subjunctive usually appears in a structure like the following:

Verbo 1 + que + Verbo 2

Verb 1 is a verb that expresses desire, probability, possibility, a command, or a negative idea or form (which are the functions that cover the imperative). The subjunctive is placed in the space marked Verb 2 (showing that the same form implies the same function, even though its syntactic placement is different.)

Conclusion: “Is saying no hables tan rápido really different than saying te pido que no hables tan rápido?” (the first phrase uses the imperative and the second one uses the present subjunctive with the exact same meaning but with just a variation in the tone of the command).

This introduction to the subjunctive is clearly just a first step for our students, but I can assure you that using it will help you avoid students’ resistance to all things subjunctive.