El tiempo que pasa

Spanish makes you choose. English says time and leaves it there; Spanish wants to know which kind you mean.

tiempo is time as a substance, the stuff that passes. No tengo tiempo is I have no time. It is also the weather, which is a coincidence of history rather than a poetic idea, and it catches every learner once.

vez is time as an occurrence. Otra vez is again, dos veces is twice, a veces is sometimes. If you can count it, it is a vez.

hora is the clock. ¿Qué hora es? asks the time in the sense a watch answers. And rato, which you will meet later, is a while.

Put the wrong one in and you are not misunderstood so much as immediately foreign. Tengo tres tiempos means nothing at all.

The one that catches everyone

mañana is tomorrow. la mañana is the morning. Same word, and only the article separates them, so mañana por la mañana is tomorrow morning and is not a typo.

Days do not take on

El lunes is on Monday. Spanish uses the article where English uses a preposition, and there is no word for on in the sentence at all. Los lunes, plural, means every Monday. One small letter is the difference between an appointment and a habit.

siempre, nunca, ya

ya is the hardest word on this list and nobody warns you. It means already, now, any more, and sometimes just right. Ya está is that is that. Ya no is not any more. ¿Ya? on its own is are you ready yet.

You cannot learn ya from a translation. You learn it from hearing it four hundred times, which is roughly what the rest of this course is for.