3.6.1 Mood: the subjunctive

What is the subjunctive?

The subjunctive is a mood.

A mood is different from a tense.  A tense tells you when an action is happening but a mood tells you something about the speaker’s feelings about the action.  “A mood is an inflection of a verb used to express a specific attitude or intent of a speaker. Depending on the language, verb moods can be used to express specific ideas, such as probability, doubt, or hesitancy” Source

The subjunctive specifically lets a speaker communicate that what they are saying is not 100% fact and a listener who hears the subjunctive in a sentence can know that they need to take whatever the speaker has said with a grain of salt.

Why is it so hard?

The subjunctive is hard for several reasons.

Reason 1:

English has fewer moods than Spanish and the subjunctive is barely used in English.  There is a linguistic term for this which is: negative transfer.  Those of us who speak English as a first or dominant language get along just fine with no subjunctive so when we first learn Spanish it is hard to understand why we need it at all. So we tend to skip it and use grammar that works in English.

Reason 2:

It’s hard to hear.  It is really easy to tell when a verb is in the preterite or imperfect but telling the difference between puedo and pueda in fast speech is hard.  There’s also a linguistic term for this.  It’s called saliency.  When something stands out in a sentence, it is salient but the present subjunctive is not salient which means it’s harder to pick out of a conversation.

Reason 3:

The subjunctive mostly happens naturally in more complex sentences.  So when you first start out you’re not using the subjunctive and you’re not hearing it.

Reason 4:

It’s usually not 100% necessary to get your basic meaning across.  Any adult Spanish speaker can use the subjunctive with ease.  Kids however, take a while to learn these forms.  So adults are used to hearing mistakes and getting the meaning anyway.  If you’re in a basic survival situation in a Spanish speaking country whomever you speak to will likely do the same for you.  There is, of course, a catch.  Which is: if you want to be taken seriously as a fluent, educated, adult speaker of Spanish, you need to move beyond this.  If you are in a 5th or 6th semester Spanish class, this is likely to be your goal.  It’s time to move beyond basic survival and into more precise speech.