S491: Elementary Spanish for Graduate Students is designed to enable graduate students to achieve an intermediate level of proficiency in reading Spanish for their research. In order to reach an adequate level of proficiency, we will study elementary and intermediate concepts of Spanish and work on translations of literary, journalistic, as well as other kinds of texts.

This is not a course in which you will learn how to speak, write or understand spoken Spanish. You will develop some rudimentary knowledge in those areas and acquire some vocabulary (both general and specific to your area of research), but that is not the focus of this course. In this course we will focus on developing your skills for syntactic and morphological analysis. This process will eventually allow you to tackle almost any text in modern Spanish and at least understand its main ideas.