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During the first few days of the semester, many of the students in my first year Spanish class have difficulty placing the accent correctly on the various forms of verbs conjugated in the present tense. They usually are able to pronounce hablamos correctly; they place the stress on -bla-, but they often mispronounce hablan and habla. Rather than stressing the next to the last syllable, even after we have studied quite carefully the rule which states that the accent falls naturally on the next to the last syllable when the word ends in "n," "s" or a vowel, many students stress the last syllable. I have called this to their attention repeatedly, often with little success, until recently when I discovered a twostep procedure which has produced positive results.

HE MERE mention of irregular verbs in an elementary or sometimes even in an intermediate Spanish class invariably causes a look of misgiving to appear in the eyes of many students. One of the efficient teacher's first tasks should be to allay this "fear of the great unknown." The easiest way I have discovered to do this is to point out, by example, the fact that most of the so-called irregular verbs in Spanish present the same difficulties in English as in Spanish, and usually in the same tenses. Due allowance must be made, of course, for the meanings and uses of the imperfect indicative and the subjunctive, but in these tenses most verbs follow rules of formation with considerable regularity. I always urge my students to buy the handy little sheet published by C. A. Graeser and happily titled Reference Chart of Spanish Verbs.' I do not wish to be accused of "plugging" for any author or publisher, but I have yet to find any device better suited to the purpose in mind. With these charts unfolded before their eyes the students can see for themselves the significance of my remarks concerning the verb-forms we discuss. With this chart or one I have prepared on the board before them, I point out that most irregularities in Spanish and English verb-forms take place in the present and preterite (simple past) indicative tenses. A study of the chart, which lists the twenty-three most important irregular Spanish verbs, confirms this statement. The chart, I should state, gives in toto only the forms that are irregular, with the irregular letters printed in green. Forms following regular rules of formation have only the "starting form"; i.e., ponga, cabr6, saldre, etc. Of the twenty-three verbs listed, sixteen are irregular in both present and preterite indicative, and of these sixteen, the following fourteen are irregular in these tenses in both Spanish and English: dar, decir, -ducir, (meaning lead, take, drive), haber, hacer, ir, poder, poner, saber, ser, estar, tenser (meaning to have or to hold), traer, and venir. Of the remaining two, querer presents no difficulty in its English meaning, and caber needs separate, detailed treatment if its meaning is to be made clear. Now we have seven verbs left on our list. One-andar-is irregular in

The development of the conjugation of Spanish verbs of the types vestir, sentir, and dormir has been treated with great skill and resourcefulness by Men6ndez-Pidal1 and more recently by P. Fouch6.2 Neither the theory of Men6ndez-Pidal nor that of Fouch6 for the development, for example, of Lat. v stio into Sp. visto, would account for the development giving the same result in Portuguese, because the type of verb (with j in Lat.) on which Men6ndez-Pidal bases his analogy does not fall into this class in Portuguese (e.g., mitio > m?co) and often does not belong to the third conjugation (e.g., conceber), while the phonological phenomenon on which Fouch6 bases his argument, viz. e > ie, is notably absent from Portuguese. Various attempts have been made to explain the situation in Portuguese. Nunes3 and Almeida Cavacas4 hold that i closes (as well as e) to i in verbs of the third conjugation (vestio > visto), while it closes q but one step to e in verbs of the second conjugation (gemo>*g mio>gqmo). It is difficult to accept a rule of phonology which operates in two ways without provision for a principle of differentiation. Furthermore, the hypothetical intrusion of a / in forms like *gemio5 destroys a dissimilarity

But the beginning student is soon coping, or trying to cope, with some nasty complications: there are two verbs that more or less correspond to English to be; there are many concepts in which English to be corresponds to Spanish to have; there are two Spanish verbs to have, a dozen ways to express time, two simple past tenses, and a vigorous and enthusiastic use of the subjunctive, including two alternating forms of its imperfect tense. How did we ever come to think that Spanish was easy? No one who has ever seriously studied it would agree. Maybe we got the wrong impression because it used to be chosen by a lot of students who were looking for an easy language. And some teachers, facing classes of lazy nonlinguists, watered down the daily dose of Spanish. Without standards, any subject can be made easy, and the result was a lot of Spanish-is-fun, your-money-back-ifit-hurts courses, with textbooks written not to teach the learner but to entertain the non-learner.