For an English speaker learning a romance language, such as Spanish, there is one aspect that differs from English the most: this is the use of verbs and their conjugation. Whilst English verbs still need to be conjugated, they do not rely so heavily upon this when communicating the meaning of a sentence and mistakes in this area are generally less severe. You must, however, conjugate Spanish verbs!

Spanish verbs are conjugated and mistakes cannot be made if you are to communicate accurately. Subject pronouns (the person or thing doing the verb) are generally omitted and thus the only way to know who’s doing what is to conjugate with accuracy and clarity.

Conjugating a Spanish verb starts with the infinitive; this is the verb in its basic form with no tense or subject applied to it. There are three types of Spanish verbs: those ending “ER”, those ending “AR” and those ending “IR”.

To conjugate a Spanish verb, you must first take away the two letter ending, leaving you with the stem of the verb. With this stem, you can conjugate the verb into the present tense by adding the ending that corresponds with the person who is doing the verb.

So the conjugation of Spanish verbs allows us to determine who is performing them, but it is also able to tell us when they are performing them, if they would be performing them and when they will be performing them. I am of course talking about verb tenses and this changes the spelling and pronunciation of the verb.

Different tenses have different rules concerning their conjugation and some even take the entire infinitive before adding an ending. You really need to get this right in order to communicate accurately and there is another thing to bear in mind: Spanish tense uses differ from English ones and thus you must understand when to use one tense instead of another. Never just assume that you can translate tenses directly from English to Spanish.

This is all very well but some verbs just don’t play fairly at all and these are all known as irregular verbs. If you have ever tried to conjugate these using the normal rules then you probably understand why some verbs have to be irregular; they would be either very difficult or impossible to pronounce under the normal conjugation rules. If you’re asking how to conjugate Spanish verbs in this irregular category then the general rule to remember is to learn these verbs by heart – nothing else will work.

So that’s how to conjugate Spanish verbs. There are a lot of endings to be memorised and a lot of irregular verbs to have learned by heart. Spanish verbs can be complicated and hard to grasp at first but the advantage of patterns is that you only have to learn them once, no matter how many regular verbs you have to conjugate.