I was a mess in Spanish class yesterday. It has really gotten hard.

Something happened as if a blender went on in my brain and all the separate tenses, their conjugations and irregulars all were mixed up into a Spanish smoothie. I can’t even tell you how upset I was.

We are in a difficult place as far as learning goes, and our teacher tells us that he’s pushing us, which is usually good for me. But sheesh, I have to figure out a way to move forward – and without further meltdowns, too.

The sentences we use in class are answers to questions in our homework. We take the sentences and each student in turn changes it based on our teacher’s prompting – for example, he will say “Paul hopes that….and then you have to change the verbs in the remainder of the sentence into the subjunctive. And then if the first part of the sentence is in the present and the second part is in the past then you need a different subjunctive that uses the haya construction. As you can tell my head is just spinning.

The future and future conditional are floating around there too, just lying in wait so they can trip me up, I think.

So, before class on Friday I am going to review our homework from the last month or two and try to make myself better “cheat-sheets” for all the tenses. I haven’t even felt like I’ve got the preterite and the imperfect all that solid yet.

So, anyone have any tricks for how to overcome brain freeze at this point in my Spanish lessons? I am determined to learn and get through this tough patch but I would like to do it without tears in the future.