General Considerations about Verbs

Spanish verbs, unlike English verbs, depend on using endings which convey the meaning of who we are referring to. In English we must use subject pronouns. For example, in English 'I eat, you eat, he eats, etc.', if we take away the 'I, you, he', we don't know who we are speaking about. It's not so in Spanish. We can say 'como, comes, come' and it's not necessary to put in the 'yo, tú, él'. However, in order to understand this process, we must know the subject pronouns and their location in the verb paradigm:

Subject Pronouns

Singular

yo (I)
tú (familiar you)
él, ella, usted (he, she,formal you)

Plural

nosotros (we)
vosotros (familiar you)
ellos, ellas, ustedes (they, they, formal you)

VerbTypes and Endings

Spanish Verbs are categorized according to the last two letters of the infinitive. These last two letters are known as the 'ending'. Since all Spanish verbs end either in -ar, -er, or -ir, they are referred to as '-ar verbs', '-er verbs', or '-ir verbs.

Verbs are conjugated by taking off the -ar,-er, or -ir ending and attaching the ending that corresponds to the verb type. For example, the endings that correspond to -ar verbs in the present tense are:

-o          -amos
-as         -áis
-a          -an


So if we take a verb like hablar the first thing we do is take off the '-ar' (which leaves us with 'habl-') and add the endings. Hablar then looks like this:

hablo       hablamos
hablas      habláis
habla       hablan


You will find the endings for all of the tenses covered in this level of Spanish Whiz in other topics.

Related Topics

Present Tense
Future (ir a) and Present Progressive
Preterite (Simple Past)
Present Perfect
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