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Spanish verb forms are, on the whole quite regimented and easy to learn. There are really three verb types you need to know; regular, irregular and reflexive verbs; and each verb, irrespective of verb type, will have one of these three endings; -ar, -er and -ir.
All Spanish verb forms WITHOUT exception will belong to one of either -ar, -er or -ir groups, but it is with the regular verbs we will start.
Regular Spanish Verbs Forms:
The regular group of verbs is by far the biggest of the three groups of verb types with the verbs that end with -ar the largest. All regular verbs follow the same pattern as laid out by the grammatical rules governing regular Spanish verbs, and they are;
When the stem of the verb is referred to it generally means, especially with regular verbs, the verb minus it’s ending, for example the stem of hablar (to speak) would be habl-.
(we will use the regular -ar verb hablar for this example)
In this example of the present tense conjugation of hablar, a regular -ar verb; you can see that the stem is used with every pronoun but the endings are different; this makes Spanish, what is lovingly called, a prodrop language; which means that in most cases the pronoun can be dropped as the verb ending will be enough to show who is performing the task.
Obviously, there will be times of ambiguity and when this is the case the pronoun is usually used.
Yo habl-o I speak
Tú habl-as You speak
Él/ Ella/ Usted habl-a He/ She/ It speaks (also you speak [singular polite]when Usted is used)
Nosotros habl-amos We speak
Vosotros habl-áis You speak
Ellos/ Ellas/ Ustedes habl-an They/ You speak ([plural polite]when Ustedes is used)
This example only shows the present tense for a regular -ar verb; but all the other tenses have their specific patterns of formation too, the main thing to remember is that all verbs that are designated regular will follow these patterns; the same can be said for -er and -ir verbs; although their endings differ from those of -ar verbs.
Irregular Spanish Verb Forms
Irregular Spanish verb forms are the scourge of the student, each verb has it’s own distinctive pattern and because of this it means that each Irregular verb has to be learned individually. Unfortunately, as is often the case in many languages, the most commonly used verbs are irregular. Now this can be deemed, a good thing or a bad thing, bad because it means learning these irregular Spanish verb forms becomes an absolute necessity and a good thing because you will get a lot of practise using them.
You will need a good verb conjugation tool to help you study Irregular Spanish Verbs and you can check out one of the newest at the end of this article. You may have heard that there are only 25 irregular verbs in Spanish, this is somewhat misleading as there are well over 2000 irregular verbs that follow over 70 different patterns, so even in irregularity there is some regularity!
Reflexive Spanish Verb Forms
Reflexive verbs are verbs that are used when the subject and the object are the the same; I wash myself for example. They are often derived from an original verb, for example; lavar (to wash) is used when you are washing an object but if you were washing yourself the reflexive verb, lavarse would be used.
As you can see when a verb is reflexive it has the addition of -se onto the end of the original verb. And here is an example of how lavarse is used:
Yo me lavo I wash myself
tú te lavas you wash yourself (familiar)
él/ ella/ usted se lava he/ she washes himself/ herself or you wash yourself (polite)
nosotros/as nos lavamos we wash ourselves (use nosotras when the we referred to is feminine)
vosotros/as os laváis you all wash yourselves (use vosotras when the you referred to is feminine)(familiar)
ellos/ ellas/ ustedes se lavan they wash themselves and you wash all wash yourselves (polite)
As you can see the regular verb takes on its normal behaviour and the reflexive part of the verb is placed before it.
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