Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Spanish Course
Hi folks. I finished a 24 week Spanish course at FSI, the Foreign Service Institute, in 2022. I spent about 1,300 hours in class / studying Spanish over the last 24 weeks, which took me from nothing to B2/C1 on the CEFR scale, or a 3/3 in speaking/reading by FSI's rating system. This community has been a big help throughout that time so I wanted to share my deck in case it's helpful for others.
The deck has ~6500 cards, and goes sequentially as I learned in FSI from indicative present -> preterite / imperfect -> perfect / conditional -> future, then into subjunctive present and past. Throughout the deck there is heavy vocabulary emphasis on professional language for diplomats related to economics, international development, international affairs, politics, the environment, and others.
What's in the deck specifically:
- All permutations of conjugations (present, past, imperfect, future) for the 50 most utilized spanish verbs in the indicative tense
- Conjugations for the most common irregular verbs and select regular verbs in subjunctive in present
- professional vocabulary on many topics: economics, drug trade, political systems, the environment, immigration, refugees, the labor market, terrorism, abortion, school shootings, freedom of speech, the second amendment, the justice system, and others.
Tips on conjugation cards:
- I created a simple shorthand to quickly identify what tense to conjugate the verbs in, past, present, etc.
- Example: Preterite "(<--) he / she / formal listed / told (narrated) (<--)" means that you should conjugate this verb in the third person in preterite.
- Example: Present "(---) I list / tell (narrate) (---)" means to conjugate in the first person in the present