Studying Spanish as if you were in Granada

You can start learning Spanish from home, thousands of kilometres from Granada. But the Clinic’s secret is simple: learn as if you were here. And that phrase — «como si estuvieras» — hides one of the most elegant structures in Spanish.

«Como si» takes the subjunctive

In Spanish, «como si» always takes the imperfect subjunctive (or the pluperfect, for the past). It compares with something unreal, imagined, hypothetical:

• Habla español como si fuera su lengua materna. (…as if it were his mother tongue.)
• Gasta dinero como si tuviera una mina. (…as if he had a gold mine.)
• Me miró como si no me conociera. (…as if she didn’t know me.)
• Vive el flamenco como si hubiera nacido en el Sacromonte. (…as if he’d been born there.)

Notice: fuera, tuviera, conociera, hubiera nacido. Never «como si es» or «como si tiene». It’s a classic mistake — and a very common Surgery operation.

Learning «as if you were in Granada»

Here’s the method: even studying remotely, you can immerse yourself as if you were strolling through the Albaicín. How?

• Listen to Granada: local radio, a flamenco singer, the murmur of a square. Learn as if that background were yours.
• Eat its vocabulary: order a coffee «con una nube», call a scatterbrain «pavo», say «mi arma». Speak as if you already lived here.
• Walk its streets with our cultural routes and the blog: read the city as if you’d always known it.

From hypothesis to reality

The beauty of «como si» is that it imagines what isn’t yet. Learning a language is exactly that: speaking as if you already knew, until one day, without noticing, you do. In Granada that day comes sooner, because the city makes you speak. But you can start today, wherever you are, as if you were about to head down for your first tapa.

Shall we practise? Write three «como si» sentences about your life in Writing and we’ll correct them. And if estuvieras, fueras or tuvieras still resist you, you know where to go: the operating theatre.