Listening: Rejoinders
Rejoinders are the shortest listening items on the exam and the easiest place to bleed points. You hear one line - a greeting, an invitation, an apology, a complaint, a compliment, a piece of news - usually once, and you choose the reply a Spanish speaker would plausibly give. There is no transcript, so you must decode the line quickly and then judge the options by their social function as much as by their grammar.
Identify the speech act first
Every prompt performs an action. Name it in one word before you read the options: greeting, invitation, refusal, apology, congratulation, condolence, request for a favor, offer, complaint, doubt. Options are usually written so that each one answers a different action, which is why the wrong choices often look grammatically fine.
Check register and person
- Decide whether the speaker uses tú or usted and keep the reply in the same register: a professor's «¿Podría usted…?» cannot be answered with «Vale, tranqui».
- Check the pronoun: if the speaker says «Te invito a cenar», a reply beginning «Me encantaría» fits; «Te invito yo» reverses the roles and is wrong unless the prompt was a refusal.
- Greetings have fixed partners: «Mucho gusto» → «Igualmente»; «Feliz cumpleaños» → «Gracias»; «Lo siento mucho» → «No te preocupes».
Match tense and mood
Listen for time markers. «¿Qué hiciste el fin de semana?» wants a preterite answer; «¿Qué vas a hacer?» wants a future or ir a construction; «¿Qué harías tú?» wants a conditional. A reply in the wrong tense is a classic distractor.
Worked example
You hear: «Oye, ¿me prestas tu cargador? Es que se me olvidó el mío.» Options: (A) Claro, aquí lo tienes. (B) Sí, me lo compré ayer. (C) No, gracias, estoy bien. Reasoning: the line is a request for a loan, softened by «Oye» and justified with «Es que». (A) grants it and hands over the object with the correct pronoun «lo». (B) answers a question about buying and contradicts itself with «Sí». (C) is the reply to an offer («¿Quieres café?»), not to a request.
Traps
- Literal answers to idiomatic prompts: «¿Por qué no vienes?» is an invitation, not a question about reasons.
- Politeness mismatch: usted forms for a friend, tú forms for a boss.
- Repeating the speaker's information instead of responding to it.
- Missing the negative: «¿No te gusta?» answered with «Sí» agrees with the negative statement - check what the option actually commits to.
- Hearing one familiar word and choosing the option that contains it.