This is lesson 2 in Crashed Culture’s Spanish Grammar series.
Regular Spanish verbs
Regular Spanish verbs. These are another one of the major building blocks of the Spanish language. In the present tense, you will always use these, and even when you get into the past and future tenses, you’ll just use a different version of these.
There are 3 types of regular Spanish verbs: ar, er, and ir. To go with these types of verbs, we have 3 types of conjugations. Let’s taco-bout it.
Regular Spanish verbs: conjugations
So, diving right in. This is how we conjugate regular Spanish verbs in the present tense, followed by an example of how they look:
AR verb conjugations
Hablar – to speak
ER verb conjugations
Comer – to eat
IR verb conjugations
Vivir – to live
And don’t you forget your accents! They are actually important!
A couple of conjugation rules
From those examples, you can make very basic sentences, but sentences nonetheless. Sentences like “yo como” (I eat) or “ella habla” (she speaks). On that end, congratulations! You can read, write, and understand your very first Spanish sentences! It’s only up from here!
There are a couple of notes I would like to make though, just to make sure you’re absolutely 100% clear about how the Spanish language works up to hear.
If you’re new to the language learning world, it’s time to learn about infinitives. Infinitives are verbs that are not conjugated, like hablar, comer, and vivir above.
What are infinitives?
We have infinitives in English, too: to smell, to hear, to touch, for example. Although the English language requires a different kind of conjugation, the idea is the same; we take an infinitive (to smell) and conjugate it based on the subject who is doing the thing (you smell, I smell, she smells).
That being said, just like we sometimes need to use just the infinitive in English (I want to smell), the infinitive is sometimes just used as-is in Spanish, too (quiero comer [I want to eat]).
When do we use the infinitive?
We don’t think about it in English, we just use it. And fortunately that helps us a lot in Spanish, because the rule for when to use infinitives are exactly the same. We should still acknowledge it, though.
We use the infinitive when we’re using two verbs in a row, like in the example of ‘I want to eat’. ‘To want’ and ‘to eat’ are both verbs – only the first verb (to want) is conjugated to partner up with the subject (I), so the second verb (to eat) stays an infinitive.
Don’t think too hard about it. It comes naturally to English-speakers anyways. I just wanted to note that for the sake of transparency!
Subject pronouns aren’t necessarily necessary
Remember subject pronouns? They’re pretty important – how else are we supposed to know who or what we’re talking about? Well…that’s actually a little easier to do in Spanish.
In English, we only conjugate verbs two ways. For example: I walk, he walks, she walks, we walk, they walk. No matter who you’re talking about, you have a 50/50 chance of getting the conjugation right. We need subject pronouns to tell us who is doing the walking.
However, in Spanish, most every conjugation is different. So, just from looking at the conjugated verbs, we can usually see who we’re talking about, whether we have a subject pronoun or not. So, in Spanish, subject pronouns aren’t necessarily necessary.
For example. Let’s look at the verb ‘to walk’ again.
- I walk
- You walk
- We walk
- Yo camino
- Tú caminas
- Nosotros caminamos
Clearly, there are some cases in which using the subject pronoun is just redundant in Spanish. As a beginner, please feel free to use it at first – that’s just good practice. But when you come across sentences without subject pronouns, don’t get confused!
Regular Spanish verbs and their rules
That’s one more cornerstone to the Spanish language done! Mastering regular Spanish verbs will really help to jump start your Spanish fluency. To summarize:
- Practice, practice, practice is the only way to master present tense conjugations
- Infinitives (to eat) are used when there are 2 verbs in a row (I want to eat) – just like in English
- It’s normal to not clarify the subject when the verb conjugation does that for you
Ready to move on?
Check out the next lesson: irregular noun genders