la lengua

I was never very good at Spanish when I took it in school. Sure, I got okay grades, but those from my Spanish classes were usually among the lowest on my report card. It was always just so confusing to me: preterite and imperfect past tenses (why are there two?), ser and estar (again, two words where one would do just fine), the subjunctive (we have it in English but we don't use it but sometimes we do but in Spanish they use it all the time but then not... what?!) But, the most confusing of all, perhaps, were commands. Mandatos, if you will. (That's Spanish for commands.) The forms of commands in Spanish are different if they are affirmative or negative. What? Yes, that's right: there are different tenses depending on if you want someone to do something or if you don't. SO, if you want to say "Eat" you would say "Come." But if you want to say, "Don't eat" you would say "No comas." Note that the conjugation of the verb has changed from an -er ending to an -ar ending (yay for subjunctive!). It also has changed conjugations from third-person to second-person. This most likely won't make sense unless you yourself have studied Spanish or another language that is equally confusing, but I just felt the need to include this background information so that my next statements would make more sense:

When you work with little kids a lot you use commands almost exclusively. I can now use the command forms of eat, drink, (don't) hit, (don't) bite, (don't) do (that), and (don't) touch (that/him/her) with close to complete confidence. Yay for learning!