Norton's Spanish Basics: Audio Podcast

Show notes: “To be or not to be: that is the question.” In this podcast we will be discussing the two different verbs for “to be”. In Spanish we say either ser or estar when we want to convey the meaning “to be”.   Every year, I ask my Spanish two students if they can tell me the difference between ser and estar. They usually regurgitate the easy-to-teach responses that they heard from they’re first year teachers: Ser is permanent and Estar is temporary. Others will fumble over an acronym or list of occasions that a teacher made them memorize. Neither of those techniques worked for me when I was learning Spanish – the first seemed to have too many exceptions and the second was entirely too cumbersome to use if I were in a conversation with somebody and having to stop mid-sentence in order to drill through a memorized list of situations just to be able to use the correct verb in the sentence that was stopped. Instead, I will give you a less concrete exa