SPAN 1000 (Beginning Spanish 1) has NO expectations of previous knowledge of Spanish. We cover present tense, object pronouns and lots of vocabulary.  This course is a bad choice for students who have ANY ability at all to use the Spanish language for present tense, basic communication.  

SPAN 1100 (Beginning Spanish 2) is a good choice for most students with some High School Spanish, but who do not feel that their ability to use the language prepares them for reading newspapers, literature and cultural essays in Spanish.   Students should understand the concepts of verb conjugation, adjective agreement.  Ideally, the student should be able to write or speak about his/her name, favorite activities, and descriptions of people and things.  However, if you feel that you would rather have a complete review of all the basic grammar at a higher speed, SPAN 2000 is a better choice.  If you would like to know in more detail what grammar topics were covered in SPAN 1000, study these tutorial pages:

SPAN 2000 (Intermediate Spanish Language and Culture 1) assumes that you have had enough Spanish to use it in surivival situations.  For example, you should be able to give and get basic personal information.  Make a monetary exchange.  Order a meal.  Tell what you did last night.  Accuracy is not essential. Also, you should be able to read a typical short newspaper article and understand about 80% of the vocabulary, and be able to answer very general questions about it. It is not expected that you should be able to understand everything in every article, but you should be able to figure out some unknown words by context in an article about a familiar topic.  You should have been exposed to verbal structures needed to communicate in present, past and future contexts.   We will have a complete review of everything covered in the first year of SPAN 1000-1100.  This class is ideal for a native speaker or near native speaker who wishes to learn grammar rules, improve spelling, etc.  We begin with the very basic concepts, and move very quickly through the material, switching to a more content-oriented format (literature, cultural readings, newspapers) by the 5th or 6th week of class.  Review the tutorials shown above, and look at the past tense tutorials.  SPAN 2000 is very similar to ENGL 1110, but it is in Spanish, and places more emphasis on the cultural and literary elements.  It assumes that you are already capable of using the language to some extent for survival situations.  

SPAN 2100 (Intermediate Spanish Language and Culture 2) assumes that you already know the following grammar topics, though you may not be proficient at them yet:

You should also look over all of the subpages connected to the Parts, Pieces and Misc. page

Native speakers should not take the 2100 course simply because it places much less emphasis on grammar drilling.  If you already speak Spanish, and wish only to improve your technical and theoretical understanding (so as to be able to teach it to English speakers) I strongly recommend SPAN 2000. 

SPAN 2100 is designed for students who wish to study Spanish culture, literature and history along with discussions of the more sophisticated points in Spanish grammar.  Basic ideas like verb conjugation of Present, Preterite, Imperfect and Present Subjunctive are assumed preparation for this course.  Do not take this course if you cannot carry on a basic conversation in Spanish about what you did last night, or what you used to do when you were young.  The course is similar to ENGL 1111 in that you will carry out a research project for which you will present a five page paper and an oral presentation with a question and answer session.  The topic of this research paper is open to your choice, but it must be something for which there are resources available to you in Spanish.  

Equivalency between our program and other university or college programs is pretty much one-to-one: one semester at the University of Minnesota is equivalent to one semester at MCTC.  There are likely to be differences in emphasis, and the equivalency may decrease if the credits are fewer at the other school.  However, for practical purposes, 4 semester credits is close enough to our 5 credits that it is not important enough to worry about.  Many programs place less emphasis on the cultural content and more on the composition and grammar than we do in the second year.  Some programs may place more emphasis on culture than we do in the first year.  Vocabulary varies from textbook to textbook, but this is not generally something that causes any real problems.  

There is no easy way to express equivalency between High School Spanish and this college level program.  The quality of Spanish programs in High Schools is variable in the extreme.  I recommend assuming that each semester of Spanish at the college level is about equivalent to 2-4 semesters of High School Spanish, depending on the quality of your program.  That means that four years of High School Spanish is about equivalent to 1-2 years of College level Spanish. If you had four years in High School in a strong program, you probably do not need even our highest course SPAN 2100.  If you had four years recently in a weaker program, you will probably want to start in SPAN 2000 or 2100.  

To see the Syllabus for each level of class select one of the following: