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Conjugating Verbs

A large amount of learning Spanish deals with "conjugations." Conjugating is taking a verb and making it agree with the subject. In English we do it all the time without even thinking about it. Take a sentence with "John" as a subject and "to have" as a verb:

John has a ladder.

In order for the subject and verb to agree, we need to change our verb, "to have," into "has."
It sounds funny when a verb is conjugated incorrectly:

I has a ladder.

In order to agree with the subject, "to have" obviously should have been conjugated as "have."

Before we get into verb conjugations, let's look at our six possible subjects: I, you, he, she, it, we, you all, and they.

(For simplicity's sake, other sentence subjects such a "Robert," "Ellen," "the toaster," "Charles and I," and "the cars," etc. function the same way as "he," "she," "it," "we," and "they.")

To help better understand, we take these subjects and arrange them into a grid based on person (first, second, and third) and number (singular or plural):

First person singular refers to the fact that the speaker or writer is referring to himself or herself ("I"). Second person singular involves speaking or writing directly to someone else ("you"), and third person-singular is writing or speaking about another person or thing ("he," "she," or "it").

If you add another person to any of these situations, you end up with a plural subject: "I" becomes "we"; "you" becomes "you all" (or "y'all" or "you guys"); and "he," "she," or "it" becomes "they."

Make sure you understand this grid. It's very important; you'll be seeing a lot of it as you study Spanish.

Now let's examine some conjugations. Look at the grid for the English (present tense) conjugations of "to have":

Notice that there's really only one difference in all the conjugations and that it occurs in the third person singular.

Spanish on the other hand is more complicated. Let's look at the present tense Spanish conjugations of "hablar" (to speak):

You should notice that, unlike English, there is a different conjugation for each subject.

As a consequence we may omit the subject since it cannot be confused with anything else:

The same cannot be said of English where we need to explicitly identify the subject:

Speak Spanish. → (?) speak Spanish.

At this point we should take a closer look at the possible subjects in Spanish. The English subjects look like this:

And the Spanish subjects look like this:

However, you may already know that when using Spanish we actually have two different possibilities for the 2nd person. One is formal (Usted/ustedes) and the other informal (tú, vosotros). Therefore our Spanish subject chart should more accurately look like this:

When filling in the same chart with verb conjugations (once again for "hablar") you should notice something:

The conjugations for the second person plural formal, are exactly the same as the conjugations for the 3rd person. To simplify things then, even though they are actually second person forms, "Usted" and "Ustedes" are added to the 3rd person box in the conjugation grid:

You can use the Spanish Verb Conjugator to conjugate any verb in all of its forms.

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