All Spanish verbs fall into one of just three categories when it comes to their endings in the infinitive:
- Those that end in -AR, like bailar (to dance)
- Verbs that end in -ER, such as comer (to eat)
- Verbs ending in -IR, as in vivir (to live)
In order to make the present tense in Spanish you must use the root (stem) of the word and then add on the appropriate ending, according to the subject and verb type (-AR/-ER/-IR).
The root or stem of the verb is the part before -ar/-er/-ir. Here are the stems of the three Spanish verbs we saw above:
- bailar → bail-
- vivir → viv-
- comer → com-
And then the endings change for each verb type, so let’s take a look, beginning with our -ar verbs.