No 'ifs' or 'buts'

Re-reading yesterday's post, I realised there'd been something niggling at the back of my mind.
Anyone familiar with the Spanish learning course recorded by Michel Thomas will have one or two of his catchphrases burned into their memory. He had a knack of summarising certain topics, which made them impossible to forget.

The most memorable is his preterite cha-cha, where he took the endings of the first and third person singular (that's 'I' and 'he/she/it/you [formal]') for 'ar' and other 'non-ar' verbs, in the preterite tense, and chanted them to a cha-cha rhythm - "e and o and i and io, e and o and i and io. It's like a cha-cha. You could dance to it and, you know what . . you'll never forget it"
You were spot on Michel. I never have.
However,unfortunately, I have to take issue with one of his other memory aids.

This one's a little  more complicated. He started with the endings for the condtional tense, which are based on '-ria'.
The word for a river is 'rio' so, if there were such a thing as a feminine river, he argued, it might be called a 'ria' - with me so far?
A word which crops up frequently in conditional phrases in English is 'would' - e.g 'I would do it, if you let me'
Michel reasoned that using conditional statments was going into the 'woulds' (woods) so the way to remember the ending was to imagine that, every time you went into the woods, you would find a feminine river (-ria)
I have to admit that, until now, like many of Michel's lessons, it has been a great help to my poor memory.
Until I started using it in the wrong place!

For a phrase to qualify as conditional, there has to be a condition.
In most cases this would be 'if', or perhaps 'provided that' or 'so long as' - so it's quite correct to say 'yo te lo traería si me pides' - 'I would bring you it, if you ask'

However, if you were to say 'When I was young, I would bring him a newspaper every day' - there's no condition. It's just something I did, or used to do.
Back to yesterday's posting - actions repeated in the past?
Correct!
Imperfecto!
So that's 'cuando yo era joven, le traía un periódico cada día'

Well apart from pointing out that little pitfall, I hope I've made two other points. One is that you CAN learn valuable Spanish lessons, which will stay with you for a long time, from a quality audio course, but the other is that there's no substitute, as you advance, for having a real teacher to pick up on, and correct any misunderstandings along the way.
All learning is good - enjoy yours.
¡Hasta luego!