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Before we start looking at verbs (doing words) and tenses (time frames) it’s useful to understand a little about personal pronouns (the people doing the action of the verb).

In English, when we are introduced to personal pronouns (the people doing the action of the verb) we learn them in a particular order and it’s according to importance, really:

• I
• you
• He/she/it
• We
• All of you
• They

Here are these again, with their Spanish equivalents:

English pronoun (person)	Spanish pronoun (person)	A ‘posh’ name for these:
I	yo	First person singular
You	tú	Second person singular
He/she/it	él/ella	Third person singular
We	nosotros/nosotras*	First person plural
All of you	vosotros/vosotras*	Second person plural
They	ellos/ellas	Third person plural

*These have two options depending on who is included in the group. For example, if ‘we‘ are a group of men you would use ‘nosotros‘. If ‘we‘ are a group of women you would use ‘nosotras‘. If ‘we‘ are a mixed group of men and women you also use ‘nosotros‘ again.

So that was a simple explanation of how to say ‘I’, ‘you’ etc with their Spanish equivalents.

Now take a look at verbs and tenses...

A tense is basically a time frame and we use it to say what we do and when.

For example, the present tense. We use this to talk about what we do at present and what we are presently doing. To find out more about the present tense in Spanish go to ‘the present tense‘ but if you are new to learning languages, I suggest you read the following to get to grips with verbs and tenses in English first.

Here’s a look at how verbs (doing words) work, in English, using the present tense:

First, you need the verb (the doing word) in the infinitive form… Think of this as the ‘head of the family‘. This infinitive form is what the verb looks like before you do anything to it and it’s how you would usually find it in a dictionary. It doesn’t say who is doing the action of the verb or when. All English infinitives start with ‘to’… that’s why we don’t know who is doing the action or when.

i.e. To speak/To speak/To live- These are all verbs in the infinitive form.

As I mentioned, in English all verb infinitives start with the word ‘to‘ and so if we want to say who is doing the action of the verb, we need to start changing the verb from the infinitive form, and making it a ‘formed’ or ‘conjugated’ verb. For example ‘I speak’ or ‘We speak’.

In Spanish, the verb infinitive doesn’t start in any particular way, instead it ends in a certain way. All verbs in their infinitive either END in ‘-ar‘, ‘-er‘ or ‘-ir‘/.

For example:

• hablar (to speak)
• comer (to eat)
• vivir (to live)

Once you know what verb you are dealing with, you can start manipulating/forming/conjugating/changing the verb so that we know who is doing the action and when.

How to manipulate/form/conjugate/change verbs in English:

Before looking at how to manipulate/form/conjugate the verbs in Spanish, let’s make sure you know how this works in English, because in reality, most English speakers are not too confident with grammar terminology and believe me… I feel you pain! Before I learnt Spanish I had no idea about the grammatical jargon and to be honest it didn’t matter until I became a high school Spanish teacher. Once you are teaching languages, you kind of need to know your English to be able to make comparisons!

So… In English, when you want to say who is doing the action of the verb you pretty much:

1. Find the infinitive you want (I.e. to wash)
2. Take off the ‘to’ (____ wash)
3. Add on the person who is doing (I wash/you wash etc)

This is what happens when speaking about most people, only there is one small change when we say ‘he/she/it… we add ‘s’ or ‘es’.

Let’s look at this in a list:

To‘ wash (infinitive)

• I wash
• You wash
• He/she/it washes
• We wash
• All of you wash
• They wash

This is how we manipulate/form/conjugate an English verb in the PRESENT TENSE.

If you want to talk in other tenses, i.e. the past tense or future tense, again you have to manipulate/form/conjugate the verb accordingly.

For example, if you want to say who is doing the verb, but you also want to say they did it yesterday (in the past) you would change the infinitive accordingly and usually, in English, that means adding ‘-ed‘ to the end of the verb infinitive:

Here’s an example with ‘to’ wash:

Yesterday, I washed the clothes.

Yesterday, you washed the clothes.

Yesterday, he/she/it washed the clothes.

Yesterday, we washed the clothes.

Yesterday, you all washed the clothes.

Yesterday, they washed the clothes.

Can you see how we just change the verb infinitive to match the person and the time frame (tense) according to what we want to say?

In Spanish you do something similar but instead of manipulating/changing the front of the verb (we call this the stem) you have to manipulate/change the END of the verb.

In a nutshell… You have to take off the last two letters of the infinitive and replace them with new letters.

How to manipulate/form/conjugate/change verbs in Spanish:

Let’s look at the verb CHARLAR (To chat)

1) Take the infinitive:

Charlar = to chat

2) Take away the last two letters from the Spanish infinitive (-ar) and the first two letters from the English infinitive (to). It leaves you with:

Charl___ = ____ chat

3) Add your new letters accordingly:

Charlo = I chat

It may seem strange to change the end of the verb instead of the front, however this is just how it works. There is, however, one extra thing to do… if you want to. You can add the Spanish equivalent of ‘I’ to the front as well.

For example:

Yo charlo

I chat

You probably think, well surely you are now saying ‘I I chat‘ if you put the equivalent ‘yo‘ as well. I guess you could say that, but it’s totally fine.

In reality, most natives wouldn’t add the ‘yo‘ unless they really wanted to add emphasis to what they are saying. However you’ll find many learners of Spanish like to include the ‘yo‘, as a sort of comfort blanket, in case they get the ending wrong.

Not all verbs follow the rules… there are some irregular rebels!

Now, unfortunately, not all verbs follow the rules in English. Therefore, it’s not always as simple as adding ‘-ed‘ to the end of the infinitive in order to say when an action happens (present), happened (past), will happen (future) etc. When a verb doesn’t do what it should, we call it an ‘irregular verb’ and there are many of these ‘irregular verbs’ or ‘irregular rebels’ out there in every language.

Just look at the verb ‘to be’ in English:

We can’t simply replace ‘to’ with ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’ etc, as that would result in us sounding like toddlers or Yoda (from Star Wars):

• I be
• you be
• He/she/it be
• We be
• All of you be
• They be

As we know, when we manipulate/form/conjugate this ‘irregular rebel’ it looks more like this:

• I am
• you are
• He/she/it is
• We are
• All of you are
• They are

In other words, it does what the heck it likes and we just have to get on board and learn it’s irregular formation/conjugation.

This also happens in Spanish. There is a rule for how to manipulate/form/conjugate the Spanish verbs but there are also some ‘irregular rebels’ that we just have to learn.

I hope you have found this introduction to the basics in English useful, it will really help you with your Spanish!

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