You don’t say “I sleeped” or “they sleeped”. It doesn’t break any rules.īut what about verbs that do break the rules? The verb follows a very predictable and regular pattern. To take it a step further, if you wanted to form a present continuous verb out of kick, you’d just put -ing on the end. (for he/she/it you’d obviously take off the -s). Then to form the past tense, you basically just stick -ed on the end of the verb kick - kicked. How would you conjugate the verb to kick in English? I’ll give you some examples in English (which also has many irregularities) that’ll help you understand Spanish irregular verb conjugation better. If you’re brand new to Spanish, you may have heard of it but aren’t quite sure what it is or why people make such a big deal out of it. Not bad, huh? 🙂 Irregular verb conjugation (why you shouldn’t stress about them) Here are the conjugated Preterite endings for both -AR and -ER/-IR verbs: That means you get to kill two birds with one stone. Let me start with the best part: -ER and -IR verbs (mentioned above) are all conjugated the same way for the Spanish preterite. This is basically the equivalent to a verb ending in -ed in English. You’ll notice that there are only slight deviations in the 1st and 2nd person plural forms ( we and you (pl.)).īut don’t get hung up on these tiny, insignificant Spanish verb conjugation deviations - in real conversations, you’ll barely even notice them! In fast, natural conversation, these subtle vowel changes blend together and sound pretty much the same.Īlso remember: irregular verb conjugation doesn’t follow these rules (but that’s not a big problem as I’ll explain in a moment!). NOTE: I’ve covered the most comprehensive Spanish online course available in the past, which covers Spanish verb conjugation in amazing detail. I cover both these points in detail below but first, let’s go over the fundamentals of Spanish verb conjugation. Irregularities can be learned gradually over time so don’t stress! You should never learn a language just by memorizing rules.Ģ. Donovan has talked about this many times before. Memorizing lists of conjugations is the wrong way to go about it. Like numbers, you can’t really communicate effectively without (fairly) accurately conjugated verbs, after all.īut there are two things I want to make clear from the outset:ġ. It’s true that every student has to contend with Spanish verb conjugation and irregularities. It’s also the thing that should worry them the least! 🙂 We will see more about verb conjugation in the next lesson.Learning Spanish verb conjugation is without doubt the thing that concerns prospective students the most in my experience. When you look for a Spanish verb in the dictionary, the verb will appear in its infinitive form. Knowing the infinitive of a verb in Spanish will help you conjugate (= change the ending of) a verb to its correct form depending on the tense (past, present, future etc.) and agreeing with the subject (who is doing the verb). These groups are based on the ending (the last two letters) of the infinitive which is either -ar, -er or -ir.Įxamples of -AR verbs: comprar (to buy), estudiar (to study), hablar (to speak), bailar (to dance)Įxamples of -ER verbs: comer (to eat), aprender (to learn), beber (to drink), vender (to sell)Įxamples of -IR verbs: dormir (to sleep), escribir (to write), vivir (to live), abrir (to open) Why is it important to know what an infinitive is? Spanish verbs are divided into three groups. In Spanish the infinitive ( infinitivo) consists of one word and not two words as in English (to + verb ….

It is not connected to any time or person so it does not have any change to its ending (no -s or -ed or -ing). It is not in the present, not in the past or future, it is the original form of the verb. What is an infinitive?Īn infinitive is the verb in its most basic form without any changes to it. Before we look at using verbs in Spanish, we first need to know what an infinitivo (or infinitive) is.

Infinitive spanish endings