Practice Dill : Para & Para Que + Subjunctive

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, Kurup Paul here. Welcome to the channel. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about the present subjunctive and how to use it with para and parake. And that's how we express purpose, like in order to or so that something happens. This video was inspired by a member of my private learning group, the Curu Spanish Crew.

[00:00:19]He recently watched my lesson on par and par and he's like, you know what, really use some more practice on this. And I thought, you know what? It's so useful.

[00:00:27]Why not just do a video and we'll practice. Now, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be going through and we're going to be translating sentences. Now, you may not know all the words in these sentences, and that's okay because that's how you push yourself. You translate what you can, and then I'm going to go through them, and you're like, you know what, there's a word for my word list. Oh, I see how that works. And we'll kind of break it down. It'll be fun. If you don't know what the subjunctive is, just think of it as a different set of conjugations that are triggered by certain grammatical constructions. We call these subjunctive triggers. It's easy to learn them. They're just little formulas and you can pop them into your Spanish and it really will propel your Spanish. Now, it's not hard to conjugate into the subjunctive. I'm not teaching that in this video. I do have a video um for it.

[00:01:09]I'll put a link to it in the description. Oh, by the way, if you want to really accelerate your Spanish, you can download a PDF version of this book.

[00:01:17]It I wrote it, Spanish subjunctive triggers. It covers high frequency um triggers and has lots of examples you can use to get you up to speed quickly.

[00:01:27]It can be a big topic. It can be information overload. This simplifies things. All right, you'll find a link to it in the description. Now, before I jump right into examples, I know some folks may not know bad and parake. So, I'm going to cover it very, very briefly here. Um means like in order to parake is also like in order to, but more like so that something happens. So, you'll see what I mean as I go through this.

[00:01:51]We're going to be breaking this down into two different formulas. Like I said, easiest way to learn subjunctive is to learn the formulas, the triggers, right? Plus infinitive, and that's the unconjugative verb. And parake plus subjunctive. When I say plus subjunctive, it means when we use this little clause, the verb that comes after it, whatever verb we choose, we're going to conjugate into the subjunctive. So, we have two formulas there, right, that we're going to be playing with, and we're going to have to choose between them. And the way we choose is this. If we choose plus infinitive, that means there is no subject change in the sentence at all. Like, if I'm just talking about I, that's it. For example, I study Spanish to talk with my friends.

[00:02:36]Right? Now, I could say, I study Spanish in order to talk to my friends, but we often leave out the in order to. Spanish won't be doing that. That's what that par is. Now, when you look at something like this, a sentence like this, it really consists of two parts, right? You have something happening here. I study Spanish. Who's the subject? I am. In order to do something, in order to talk with my friends. Who's talking to their friends? I am. Same subject, no change.

[00:03:03]Plus infinitive. Now, you might be tempted because we're not saying in order to in English all the time to try to come up with something like I study Spanish to talk abl and just try to stick that infinitive onto that noun.

[00:03:20]Spanish does not like that. No, they want some kind of preposition, some kind of connector in there. And that's what bar is doing here. So, even though we're not hearing in order to in English, if you could put it in, needs to be there.

[00:03:33]Now, if we have a subject change in our sentence, we have a different subject in the first part than the second part, that's when we're going to use our second formula, bar plus subjunctive.

[00:03:44]And that's where it gets a little bit more complicated because we have to conjugate into the subjunctive. Now, in English, we're often going to translate that as so that or so. There's a couple different sos in Spanish. This is the one that's showing purpose for something. I work a lot so that my kids have a good life or so my kids have a good life. That type of so.

[00:04:07]Now we would have to conjugate the have a good life part in the subjunctive. So what would that look like?

[00:04:18]Right. It's which comes from the verb and that is conjugated in the subjunctive. Now you may be like okay that looks a lot like I have. Right.

[00:04:29]Yes, it does. Um, to conjugate into the present subjective, as I told you, is not hard. You're going to take the first person of the present tense, like that's dango. And if it's an e, r i verb, then we're going to get, you know, a endings.

[00:04:42]Da, da, damos, dan, etc. Again, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. I have a video on it, but it's not difficult to learn how to conjugate. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the practice section. If you want some more time to work on these, maybe you feel more comfortable writing them out. It's up to you to pause the video. I'm just going to take a reasonable pause that would take for somebody to say the sentence, not think about it too hard. You pause it if you need to. Here's our first one.

[00:05:08]I drink coffee to wake up.

[00:05:16]You ready to cafe?

[00:05:20]Did you remember that par? We don't like this dangling, you know, verb stuck to a noun there. We got to attach it with something and we're using that preposition bad in there. I drink coffee in order to wake up. We chose that construction because I'm the one drinking coffee. I'm the one waking up.

[00:05:36]One thing I do want to point out there is even though we're dropping in our infinitives, right? Our infinitive to wake up would be desper.

[00:05:46]I have a may here. When we're working with infinitives that we attach to other verbs, we have to pay very close attention to the reflexive pronoun. We need to make sure it matches whomever we're talking about, right? You know, your reflexive pronouns may, they say, no, o for you folks in Spain. Say down there at the bottom again. [snorts] It needs to match here. We're talking about, right? I, me, so it's may. I get up early to arrive on time.

[00:06:26]Right?

[00:06:28]Is to get up is to wake up. You hear me say this a lot in videos because you can wake up and just lay there. It doesn't mean you actually get up. And to arrive on time, very useful little uh phrase there. I work a lot in order to save money or to save money. I put that little in order to for you. You know, it's probably not on the screen.

[00:06:55]That is not an easy one to say.

[00:06:59]Little harder because that par is ending with an A.

[00:07:03]It would kind of blend.

[00:07:08]I speak slowly so that you understand me.

[00:07:20]Right. Did you get that one? Andas is going to be in the subjunctive. So, you're starting to pick out from your English if you're saying so that or it's the so like for purpose. Is that helping you? It always helped me. Now, there are other so you know you can have um you know what uh it's raining today.

[00:07:42]So, I'm going to stay home.

[00:07:48]That's a different one. Or you might have the one where you're kind of beginning a sentence. You know, somebody says something, you're like, "So, you don't want to go to the store." That would be in.

[00:08:03]But this is the purpose one in the middle. Okay. I do have a lesson on the different sews. We plan to arrive early so that Carlos doesn't have to wait.

[00:08:13]There is a lot going on in there, folks.

[00:08:15]A lot.

[00:08:18]And I'm on my last swallow of coffee.

[00:08:23]Are you ready?

[00:08:28]Carlos, did you get that? I want to explain a few things there. Before I get more coffee, to plan, to do something.

[00:08:38]There's different ways, different verbs you can use. Um, but a very common one is pens, right? To think pens plus the infinitive is to plan to do something.

[00:08:48]Hopefully, you got parake. We clearly had a um different subject, right?

[00:08:52]Subject change here. And in our second section is one of the constructions I teach all the time to beginners if you're taking my Spanish master course is to have to do something.

[00:09:03]plus infinitive. And here we see it popped in after. So, we're conjugating the subjunctive, but it's it's a construction you should know, especially if you've been taking my Spanish master course. So, we have Carlos.

[00:09:19]You know, when you're learning Spanish, um, what you're actually doing is you're learning little chunks of the language, little snippets, kind of like this and plus infinitive, and then you're popping them together, you know, to create sentences. And once you understand how to use them, you can actually create sentences you may never have seen or heard before in your whole life, but they will be correct. All right, let's get back to the practice. This one's going to be a little bit more difficult.

[00:09:46]Got a few things working in here. Like I said, I like to push folks out of their comfort zone so they get better. I'm going to send Juan a message so that he doesn't get lost.

[00:10:01]I forgot to go get coffee. All right, we are back in business, folks. All right, where we at? I'm going to send Juan a message so that he does not get lost.

[00:10:15]Let's talk about a couple things we have there. Um, right up front we have a le.

[00:10:20]Even though we're mentioning Juan, this is called a redundant le, a redundant pronoun in Spanish. Very common with verbs that were sending or giving something to someone like d to give to say. Here we have mandar to send to someone. Now you may have used the verb envir and that's fine too. So we're going to send Juan a message. Hopefully you noticed there was a subject change is to get lost. Okay, is to lose. Perce is to get lost, right? You kind of lose yourself. And that's in the subjunctive.

[00:10:57]All right, let's just do one more. Um, I mean, I could do these all day and then people would see a 30 minute video and they're like, no, I'm not watching that, Paul. I need to study more in order to improve my Spanish. That's a good one to end on.

[00:11:15]Are we ready?

[00:11:22]Did you get that one? Hope you got that one at the end. You know, it's a good one to end on. If you enjoyed the video, do me a favor and give it a thumbs up.

[00:11:29]And remember, if you want to get a PDF download of this particular guide to learn subjunctive triggers quickly and see some examples, you'll find that link in the description section.

[00:11:40]Well, until next time.