Working Through the Realidades 3 Chapter 5 Practice Set
Chapter 5 of Realidades 3 focuses on health and medical vocabulary. The activities ask you to practice giving advice using the imperative form with indirect object pronouns. You are working with commands like "tome," "descanse," "beba," and attaching pronouns to them. This particular activity asks you to match health problems with the right advice, then rewrite each pair as a command with a pronoun attached. It sounds straightforward. It is, mostly. Here is the core pattern. You take a problem statement like "Tengo dolor de estómago" and convert it into a command: "Tómese una pastilla." The pronoun "se" attaches to the affirmative command, and the accent mark moves to preserve the original stress. That is the mechanical part everyone gets right on the first try.
The part people mess up is the negative form. If the instruction says to give advice in the negative, the pronoun goes before the verb instead. "No te tomes esa pastilla." The accent rule changes too. I see students forget to shift the stress when they move the pronoun in negative commands, and then the word looks wrong even though they know the grammar. I remember running into a specific issue with one of these exercises where the textbook used a reflexive verb with a body part, and the pronoun placement created confusion about whether "se" was reflexive or indirect object. For example, "Lávate las manos" versus "Dóse las manos." They look identical in structure but mean completely different things. I just made a quick note on my scratch paper labeling each "se" as either reflexive or IOP (indirect object pronoun), and that cleared things up immediately. When you hit the section with "usted" commands, pay attention to the subject given in the prompt. Some activities use "tú" and some switch to "usted" mid-problem set. If you conjugate for "tú" when the prompt expects "usted," the whole answer looks wrong even if your vocabulary is correct. I started underlining the pronoun hint in each prompt before translating anything. That habit alone fixed about half of my errors on this chapter.
The vocabulary here includes common ailments: dolor de cabeza, fiebre, resfriado, gripe, alergia, dolores de estómago, náuseas. And the associated treatments: tomar medicina, descansar, beber mucho líquido, ir al médico, ponerse una venda, no comer comida grasosa. Knowing which treatment pairs with which ailment matters because the activity sometimes gives you the medical problem without stating it plainly, and you have to infer it from context clues in a short dialogue. One counter-intuitive thing about this chapter that beginners miss: the command forms for stem-changing verbs behave differently than you might expect. "Dormir" becomes "duerma" in the affirmative command, but when you attach a pronoun, it stays "duérmete" — no, wait, that's wrong. It stays "duerma" and you attach "se" to get "duérmanse" for plural usted. Actually, let me be more careful. The stem change does not happen on the command form of dormir. It is "duerma" / "duerman." You attach pronouns normally: "duérmanse" is incorrect. It is "duermanse" with an accent because the stress shifts. This trips people up constantly. I had to check this twice myself. Another nuance: the "o" to "u" spelling change in commands. Verbs like "dormir" and "morir" change the o to u when you form the affirmative tú command. "Duerme" not "dorme." Again, attaching the pronoun does not change this. "Duérmete" takes an accent but the stem stays "duerm-."
If you are stuck on the actual answers for this activity, most teachers will not accept work that is copy-pasted from an answer key because the format often changes each semester. What actually helps is doing the attachment yourself. Take each verb, write the command, then add the pronoun, then check whether it needs an accent mark by reading the syllables out loud. Spanish accent rules for attached pronouns are mechanical. Once you do five or six of them by hand, you stop making mistakes on the rest. The textbook also sometimes includes a listening component tied to this activity. A doctor gives advice and you write down the command with the pronoun. In my experience, the audio plays at about normal speed twice. The first time through, just write down the verb you hear. The second time, attach the pronoun and adjust the accent. Trying to do it all in one listen rarely works unless you already have strong command recognition in Spanish. If your edition of Realidades 3 differs from mine, the chapter numbering may have shifted slightly. Pearson has released multiple editions over the years, and some have the health chapter in a different position. Double-check that you are looking at the right chapter by confirming the unit title mentions salud or médico terminology. Doing so saves about ten minutes of confused flipping through the book.
