A tall order

We have our Spanish exam on Thursday afternoon. Although it is no big deal because  our lives don’t depend on it, we would like to do well.

Yesterday we quizzed our teacher about the sort of questions that might come up. He gave the distinct impression that he hadn’t actually prepared the paper yet so what he explained might not be 100% accurate.

The first question will consist of some comprehension questions based on a short passage. Then Eduardo expects us to write a short story of no less than five lines from our imagination. A simple task? No not really.

First off we have to think of something interesting to write about. We wouldn’t want to bore Eduardo with some trite account of our lives here – he’s already heard that. At the same time though we have to work within the limits of our Spanish vocabulary and grammar.

If it is an account of the past, we’ll have to work with verbs in the past tense. Should we use the preterito imperfecto, the preterito indefinido or maybe even the imperfect form? Will we get the subject and object order right and will we remember to use the correct determinantes which are so important in Spanish? God help us if we confuse por and para by using the wrong one and even worse use adjectives in the wrong gender to correspond with our nouns.

This is going to take a lot of thought and I have to say, we are not relishing the task. This is definitively a case where we need to apply the KISS principle (Keep It Stupid Simple).