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Parkside Guide to Spanish Verbs By Alexander
McNair, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Spanish ¡Bienvenido/a! This site is meant to help Parkside students understand the ins and outs of the Spanish verb system. Use the table of contents below to go directly to your topic of choice or read straight through from beginning to end simply by scrolling down. 1.
Introduction The Spanish verb system presents problems for English speakers because, unlike the English verb system, it is highly inflected (from the Latin inflectere, meaning to bend or change). Take an English verb like to love in the present tense--I love, you love, he loves, we love, y'all love, they love--do you notice how the word love does not change at all (except for the slight change in the third person singular form loves)? Not so in Spanish. The verb amar (to love) changes its ending every time the subject changes:
I love = yo amo The English language has inflection, of course, but not nearly the amount of verbal inflection that we find in Romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. The Spanish verb has two main parts: the root (or stem) and the ending. The root (the letters in blue above) is very stable and does not normally cause any difficulty (exceptions will be noted), but the ending (the red letters in our examples above)--as you may have noticed--changes a great deal. There are three categories of verbs in Spanish, marked by there infinitive (or generic) endings: -AR, -ER, and -IR. When you give the verb a subject (i.e., make it finite as opposed to the more infinite nature of the infinitive), you will need to remove the infinitive ending and add a personal ending as we did with the verb amar. We noticed there that the verb's root did not change, only the ending. The AR, ER, and IR verbs have different endings, so we will study them separately a continuación. We will begin by learning the present and past (preterit) tenses; yes, there are different endings for the present and the past! How else could we tell the difference? This system of inflection, or bending the verb endings to distinguish tense and subject, has many advantages. It leads to greater flexibility in word order, for example, and frequently obviates pesky helping verbs, adverbs, and subject pronouns since they become redundant. The obvious disadvantage of this system--only from the point of view of the English speaker learning Spanish--is that it requires a lot of memorization up front just to be able to form simple sentences correctly. The verb endings are crucial! If you get them wrong you will sound like Tarzan at best (and we won't even elaborate on the possible "at worst"). Mark Twain referred to the verb as the "storm-center" in his essay "Italian with Grammar" and, though he was being humorous, he is very close to the truth concerning the importance of verbs in any Romance language; the verb with its inflections will communicate (or at the very least provide clues about) key information (subject, tense, aspect, mood). So be prepared to log plenty of study time in order to master this system. The first group of verbs that we will learn are the AR verbs. Verbs with an infinitive ending in AR are the most numerous in Spanish and we have already seen the endings for the present tense with the verb amar. Every time you need to give the verb a subject you simply take off the AR ending and add a personal ending (-o or -amos for example) to the root. Thus, "to love" becomes "we love" by changing the ending: AMAR ---> AMAMOS Regular AR verbs have the same set of endings for the present tense, so once you learn one verb you can apply the same endings to any other regular AR verb. Let's try it with the verb "to hate" (odiar) for example. We can change from "to hate" to "we hate" the same way we did with the verb amar: ODIAR ---> ODIAMOS The ending you choose for your AR verb will depend on the subject (I? You? We? They? Segismundo? Rigoberta?). In Spanish we have six separate endings, one singular and one plural for first person (I and we), second person (you and you's guys), and third person (he/she/it and they). The present tense endings with sample pronouns are as follows: Singular
Plural
Now you can conjugate any AR verb in the present tense; just replace the infinitive AR ending with any of the endings above and you have successfully conjugated! The following are some common AR verbs: HABLAR
= to speak Read the following sentences and notice how the endings of the verbs correspond to their subjects: Yo
hablo
español. Notice that some of the subjects are in [brackets]. Most of the time those subject pronouns will be eliminated altogether, because the ending itself is unambiguous about the verb's subject. If deseas means "you desire", then why put in a subject pronoun tú to express "you" again? Redundant pronouns call attention to themselves and add emphasis to the subject of the verb; you will sound emphatic even if you're not trying to be emphatic. The present tense is actually the most useful of all the tenses you will learn, because it is so flexible in Spanish. One verb conjugated in the present tense, hablo, for example, can cover a lot of meanings that the English language uses different structures to communicate: I speak (generally), I am speaking (at this moment), I do speak, do I speak?, I'll speak (immediate future). The Spanish verb system is much more economical than the English system; with only one word (a root and an ending) Spanish can communicate what English needs a whole cast of pronouns and auxiliary verbs to communicate. AND THE PAST TENSE? But what if we want to express an action that has already taken place? "I studied yesterday" instead of "I study in the afternoons" or "I'm studying French." Well, Spanish has a different set of endings for the past tense; they are: Singular
Plural
Notice the accent marks! They are very important for pronunciation, they signal stress and allow the listener/reader to tell whether you're speaking in the present tense or the past. For example: hablo (pronounced HAB-loh) is the "yo" form in the present, not to be confused with habló (pronounced hab-LOH), which is the "él" or "ella" form in the past. Let's look at our sample sentences again, but instead of assuming that the time frame is the present or immediate future we will throw it back into the past; let's say last semester: El semestre pasado... Yo
hablé
español en clase. Our time frame (tense) has changed dramatically, but nothing else has changed. The subjects are still the same, so the only thing we need to do is use a different set of endings for the past tense. 2.1 How to Study the Verbs: Tips. Now that we have two sets of endings--present and past for regular AR verbs--it's a good time to go over some tips on how to remember those crucial verb endings. There's really no way around it, you have to memorize these forms on your own (your instructor already knows them and can't do the memorization for you). With practice the endings will become second nature, but it takes a lot of practice and you have to start with the memorization process. Try taking the AR verbs you have already (the list above) and writing them out with different subjects (changing the endings accordingly). Say them aloud as you do, so you can get as many of the senses into this memorization process as possible: writing it, seeing it, saying it, and hearing yourself saying it. If you just stare at the endings on the page you aren't activating different areas of your brain, firing different synapses, to help reinforce the forms and your recall will be slower as a result. Do this writing and rewriting of the forms for both the present and past tenses. Some more tips: * Try to imagine yourself doing the actions as you practice the forms (this helps reinforce the meaning of the verb, which sometimes gets lost in our anxiety over the forms themselves). * Try to imagine a time frame for the actions/forms you are practicing; if you're practicing the past tense endings, for example, think about last night or last semester (this will keep you from confusing the present and past tense endings later). * As soon as you feel familiar enough with the endings from writing them over and over for different verbs, make flash cards. With flash cards you will be able to test yourself and decrease the amount of time it takes you to produce the correct forms (thus making them more second nature). [STUDYING WITH FLASH CARDS: Limit yourself to one word per card. On one set of cards write possible subjects. On another set of cards write your verbs. Shuffle the two "decks" and then simultaneously pull out one subject and one verb card. As quickly as you can, say what the verb form should be for that subject. So, for example, if you pull out the subject "tú" and the verb "necesitar", then you would say NECESITAS. If you got the subject "nosotros" and the verb "tomar", then you would say TOMAMOS. Practice five to ten minutes with the present tense and then switch over to the past tense for 5-10 minutes. Rinse and repeat. The more time you spend with the flash cards, the quicker you will get, which means your speech will be more natural sounding and fluent.] * Practice a minimum of 20 minutes a day (EVERY DAY) with the verbs. Memorization work gets these verbs into the short-term memory after only a couple of hours; but in order to make these forms part of your long-term memory you have to continue practicing them day after day consistently. Skip a couple of days after you first week or two and you'll be right back at square one! Don't torture yourself: memorize them once, but then continue to practice them daily without fail until they manage to seep into your long-term memory. *Be prepared to practice for hours and hours, yet still make mistakes. Be patient with yourself... learning a language is as difficult as learning to play a musical instrument. Would you expect to be able to play Bach or Mozart perfectly after only a few weeks of daily practice on the harpsichord? Certainly not; but you would still practice diligently in order that some day you might be able to do so. Verbs that end in ER or IR work just like verbs whose infinitves are AR, the only thing that changes is the "theme vowel." While the verb hablar, for example, makes use of the vowel "a" in most of its endings, we can't expect verbs like comer (to eat) or vivir (to live) to do the same. ER/IR verbs have nearly the same endings, but instead of using "a" as their theme vowel they use "e." Let's have a look at the ER endings for the present tense: Singular
Plural
The IR verbs have almost identical endings. The exceptions occur in the "nosotros" and "vosotros" forms: Singular
Plural
Now, anytime you come across an ER/IR verb, you'll know how to conjugate it. Just lop off the infinitve ending and add the above endings to the root. As in the following examples: Comer --> [yo] como. (I eat) Vivir --> [nosotros] vivimos en Wisconsin. (We live in Wisconsin) Beber --> Juan y José beben cervezas. (John and Joe drink beers) Aprender --> Josefina aprende mucho en clase. (Josephine learns a lot in class) Abrir --> [tú] abres el libro en la biblioteca. (You open the book in the library) Comprender --> ¿Comprendes al profesor? (Do you understand the professor?)
The Past tense of ER/IR verbs is even easier. It's very similar to the past tense of AR verbs and there are absolutely no differences between ER and IR verbs so that you only have to memorize one set of endings for both. Here they are: Singular
Plural
Here are our examples again, but in the past tense this time: Comer --> [yo] comí. (I ate) Vivir --> [nosotros] vivimos en Wisconsin. (We lived in Wisconsin) Beber --> Juan y José bebieron cervezas. (John and Joe drank beers) Aprender --> Josefina aprendió mucho en clase. (Josephine learned a lot in class) Abrir --> Abriste el libro en la biblioteca. (You opened the book in the library) Comprender --> ¿Comprendiste al profesor? (Did you understand the professor?) So, really you only have two new sets of endings to memorize--one for the present tense and one for the past tense of ER/IR verbs (with slight differences between ER and IR verbs in the nosotros/vosotros forms of the present tense)--after which you should be able to handle any regular verb in the present and basic past tense. This is a huge step forward. Not all verbs are regular, however. And you'll want to know about the irregular ones too, because they tend to be "high frequency" verbs, which means they're used a lot in everyday language. The next two sections will point out some of the more common irregularities... One irregular verb that you've probably seen a lot to this point in your studies is the verb ser ("to be"). This verb is irregular (just as it is in English) and the first person singular, the "yo" form, is helpful for remember some of the other verbs with irregular "yo" forms. As you can see, the verb ser is highly unpredictable in its other forms and so your best bet is simply to memorize them:
The ending -oy is also to be found in the "yo forms of three other verbs that are used a great deal: estar ("to be"), dar ("to give"), ir ("to go"). The verb dar is regular in its other forms, but the other two verbs will take a little extra work to remember as they are highly irregular like the verb ser--that is to say you couldn't figure these forms out just by looking at the infinitive to find a "root." Here they are completely conjugated in the present tense:
Another set of verbs has an irregular "yo" form with a "g" in it. I call them the "funky G form verbs." They're high frequency verbs, so you've probably already run across them: hacer ("to do/make"), poner ("to put/place"), tener ("to have"; also used in lots of idiomatic expressions), venir ("to come"), decir ("to say/tell"), and traer ("to bring"). Here are the full conjugations in the present--notice the funky "g":
Two more verbs that have irregular "yo" forms, though they are regular in every other respect in the present tense are the verbs meaning to know: saber (meaning to know facts/to know how...) and concocer (to know someone/to be aquainted with a place). Here are their complete conjugations in the present, though the only form you wouldn't get by taking the root and adding the regular endings for ER verbs is that "yo" form:
The key to remembering all the irregular forms of these verbs is practice, practice, practice. Flash cards are the most efficient way to do that at first. Flash yourself frequently! Also, the more you use and hear these words in context the more likely they are to sink in for good, so get out there and practice your Spanish... sure, you'll make mistakes, but you'll never learn the correct way if you don't at least try. Native-speakers half expect the non-native to say things like "yo sabo" and "yo tieno" at first anyway, so most will do you the favor of correcting your gaff. Don't be discouraged; those learning experiences will help you remember that irregular better next time. |