Experdize Spanish Doctor - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Spanish consultorio. You are the médico, and you are not running the surgery — the surgery runs itself: she walks to the couch, the monitor, the laboratory bench and the medicine cabinet on her own, and files cards at reception and washes her hands when nobody is waiting. What you do is read Spanish and answer two questions for every patient.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a session is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole surgery stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody comes in and no patience bar moves — so you can read every line as slowly as you need. If a row of answers is up, choosing one starts the surgery again; if there is no row — she says she is on it, somebody grumbles, somebody says thank you — tap the play button on the speech bubble when you have finished reading it. The stopwatch at the top counts up rather than down: it is your result, not your deadline, and your fastest run at each session is kept.

1 — What is wrong with them? A patient describes their symptoms: Me arde muchísimo al tragar. — “it really burns when I swallow.” Pick the diagnosis off the row along the bottom. ⚠ Half the complaints name the illness and half only describe it, so you cannot get through by matching words alone. And the wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: dolor de cabeza headache, dolor de barriga stomach ache, dolor de espalda back pain and dolor de muelas toothache — one word of pain and four parts of the body, so reading only the first word is a one-in-four guess. Pick the wrong one and she is not stopped: she examines for it, finds it is not that, and walks back to look again — which costs her the trip, in front of you.

⚠ And what English puts there, Spanish leaves out. It is dolor de cabeza with nothing between de and the noun — never dolor de la cabeza — where the same phrase in French must have its article. An English speaker coming to Spanish through French inserts one every time. And the verb goes the other way round from English: you do not have a pain, the pain acts on you — me duele la cabeza, “the head hurts to me”, so the body part is the SUBJECT and the person is the object.

2 — What do you prescribe? She examines and asks herself El paciente tiene dolor de garganta. ¿Qué le receto? — “the patient has a sore throat; what shall I prescribe?” Pick the medicine. ⚠ Five of the twelve open with the same prefix — un antipirético, un analgésico, un antihistamínico, un antihipertensivo, antibióticos — so what it is against is the whole of the reading. ⚠ And two of the twelve wear no article at all: antibióticos and reposo, because Spanish drops it in front of an unspecified plural and in front of a mass noun, exactly where French must put des or du. The little word is doing work by being absent.

⚠ And the written accent is a letter, not an ornament. It moves the stress and with it the word: tensión carries one because the stress falls on a final syllable ending in -n, and tensiones does not, because the plural pushes the stress into the middle where Spanish marks nothing. A learner who writes tensiónes has applied the rule they were taught. The say-it-like-this line puts the stressed syllable in CAPITALS for exactly this, and on Avanzado it is not there.

The sessions are the words, and the waiting room is the session. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: Principiante writes the say-it-like-this and the English under every line, Intermedio the say-it alone, Avanzado the Spanish with nothing under it. The Session row is who is in the waiting room and what can be wrong with them: session 1 is Lucía and Carlos with fevers, coughs and aches; session 2 brings Mateo, sore throats and flu; session 3 Doña Carmen, cuts, dizziness and toothache; session 4 bebé Ana, food poisoning and allergies; and session 5 Don Miguel, broken bones and blood pressure. From session 3 what was said fades a few seconds later — tap whoever said it to hear it again, free but for the time, which is the one tap left on the floor. And somebody is sent down the corridor for a blood test and comes back with the slip.

You cannot lose a session. Somebody who waits too long gives up and goes to the pharmacy instead — that costs you the care and your streak, and they say so — but nothing ends the session except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.