⚡ Spanish Fluency Lessons Beginners
Grammar zone
Spanish verbs – What you need to know
- Spanish extensively modifies verb endings to indicate person, mood and tense.
- That’s why most verbs have more than 30 forms in contrast with the three of English.
- In Spanish, there are regular verbs, which follow the same pattern.
- and irregular verbs, these are the verbs that only follow their own rules or the rules that apply only to a small group of verbs that behave like them.
Today you will learn…
The Spanish Present Tense
The Spanish simple present tense (el presente or el presente del indicativo) can be used to talk about habitual actions, routines, things happening now or in the near future, universal truths, facts, hypotheticals, lapses of time, and for ordering in restaurants and stores.
- How to conjugate regular verbs in Spanish?
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.
