New to Spanish? Let’s start with the Present Tense

The Present Tense is not complicated

This post is to introduce you to the Present Tense. You’ll realize that you just need to understand simple rules and how they work. Once you understand them, you’ll be able to use different tenses easily, not just the present.

Romance languages, like Spanish, with all its grammar, verbs and tenses now may look complicated and hard to learn. So congratulations on taking your first step toward the Spanish language journey.

In this article I’ll cover the following topics

• The structure of verbs (stem + ending)
• How Spanish conjugation works
• How the Present Tense works
• Some uses for the Presente Tense

The structure of verbs

As a general rule in Spanish, every verb consists of two parts, the stem part and an ending.

The stem is the part that never changes and the ending is going to depend mostly on the mood and the tense you conjugate and the personal pronoun you’re using to speak.

This rule applies to regular verbs, the stem stay as it is, the change happens in the ending. Of course there’s exceptions to these rules called irregular verbs, you are going to find some examples in this post as well.

Let’s use the verb comer to illustrate this, comer in Spanish is to eat, in this example com is the stem and the ending is er.
When you want to conjugate this verb you need to replace the er part (ending).

How Spanish conjugation works

Remember, the stem part stays as it is, the ending changes.

This ending changes depending on the person who is speaking. There are three persons in Spanish 1st person, 2nd person and 3rd person.

The first one is the speaker, I (or Yo in Spanish) is the 1° Person for the singular and We (or Nosotros in Spanish) is for the 1°Person of the plural. Remember that in Spanish words usually have genders, for We it can go Nosotros (masculine) or Nosotras (feminine).

The second one is for the person you’re speaking to, in English you use the same personal pronoun you for both singular and plural. Spanish has 2° Person for the singular Tú or Vos (these two have the same meaning but its use depends on the country), and 2° Person for the plural Vosotros or Ustedes (same case as in tú and vos, you’ll normally hear vosotros in Spain).

And finally the third person, is not the speaker or the person you’re talking to. For the 3° Person Singular, it is the same as in English He or Él in Spanish and She or Ella. But for the plural in English you have They and in Spanish Ellos or Ellas(again remember the gender).

Here is a summary of the Spanish personal pronouns.

Infinitives

The infinitives are the most basic form of a verb. They don’t indicate any tense or personal pronoun.

There are three ending groups of infinitives ar,er and ir.

When you conjugate the verb we change the endings -ar, -er and -ir for the one the tense and person indicates.

How the Present Tense works

How to form the conjugations for regular verbs

At this point you know what the infinitives and the Spanish persons are.

With all these you’re ready to begin to conjugate verbs in Spanish. You’re going to start with the present tense and see it’s actually pretty easy and simple.

Let’s take the first step with the verb comer (to eat). Remember it has the stem com and the ending er, comer is the infinitive form of the verb and it belongs to the er group.

So, how do I say I eat in Spanish?

The answer is yo como, como is the conjugated form of comer. You just have to change the ending from erto o.

If you want to say he eats the ending changes from er to e, it’d be él come.

Look at this table here

You just need to replace the -ar, -er,-ir part for the right ending.

Another example could be the verb tomar (to drink).

Observe here that if you want to say he drinks, the ending changes not to e as in comer but to a, él toma not el tome. This is because they belong to different groups of endings( comer ends with -er and tomar with -ar).

Present tense, form for regular verbs

For the purpose of making things easier, here you have the conjugations in a table. Now you understand infinitives and how different persons change verb endings. That’s all you need to understand.

You can conjugate any regular verb in Spanish the same way. The changed ending part is in bold.

Eg. You want to conjugate the verb amar(to love), tomar(to drink) and cocinar(to cook) for the 2°Person, singular

You can start practicing with daily routine verbs as cocinar(to cook), comer(to eat), tomar(to drink), caminar(to walk), leer(to read), correr(to run),escribir(to write).

Conjugation for irregular verbs

What’s an irregular verb?

Look at this example

You have the verb empezar(to start) and try to conjugate it. If this was a regular verb the right answer would be Yo empezo. But this is an irregular verb, it means you can’t conjugate it by the rules you learnt before.

The right answer is Yo empiezo, see how the stem part now changed.

There are several cases of irregularities. The cases you’re going to learn in this post are stem vowel changes and consonant changes verb+cz and verb+y.

After you finish reading conjugate these irregular verbs for all the persons and see what happens.

Stem vowel change

There are three cases, E > IE, O > UE, E > I

E > IE

O > UE

E > I

Consonant changes

Here are the two cases Verb + cz and Verb + y

Verb + cz

It’s always for verbs that end in -er and also the verbs that end in -ducir

Eg. Conducir (to drive)/ Yo conduzco

Traducir (to translate)/ Yo traduzco

Verb + y

The infinitive of these verbs always ends with -uir

Another example: destruir (to destroy)/ Yo destruyo

Reflexive Verbs

Reflexive verbs describe an action that’s being performed over the subject itself. These verbs are conjugated with a reflexive pronoun, and this pronoun is part of the verb.

One example is the verb arrepentirse (to regret). If you look at its infinitive, you’ll notice it’s different from the ones you studied first. It doesn’t end just with -ar, -er, or -ir but you add the se part also.

Eg. arrepentirse

Me arrepiento de haber comprado ese auto

I regret buying that car

When you conjugate the verb you have to use the corresponding reflexive pronoun according to the grammatical person. In the example for the person Yo the pronoun is me.

Inside this group we have verbs that always need the reflexive pronoun and others that don’t. If you think about the verb arrepentirse, this is not an action you can do to another person or for another person, so you don’t have the infinitive form arrepentir of the verb. The correct one is arrepentirse, it always needs a pronoun.

But there are verbs like dormir (to sleep) for example that can go both ways.

Eg. dormir/dormirse

For dormirse

(Él) Se esta durmiendo He is starting to fall asleep

For dormir

(Él) Esta durmiendo He is sleeping

In this case the pronoun is se for the person He/Él.

Form

Here’s a table with the pronoun for each person

Some uses for the Present Tense

Actions that take place at the moment

Immediate present, it describes a situation that’s happening while the person is speaking.

Eg.

Estoy enfermo I’m sick

I’m saying at this moment I’m sick, I can use it with another states or feelings like feliz (happy) or triste(sad).

Estoy feliz I’m happy

Estoy triste I’m sad

Actions that take place frequently

To talk about habitual actions, daily routines or activities the person does frequently.

Eg.

Todos los días me levanto a las 8am Every day I wake up at 8am

A general truth

To express a timeless truth or universal laws, things that won’t change with time.

Eg.

Los caballos son mamíferos Horses are mammals

Los triángulos tienen tres lados Triangles have three sides

Remember:

• Verbs in Spanish have two parts, a stem part that never changes and
  an ending
• When the verbs aren’t conjugated their endings are always -ar, -er and -ir. These are called infinitives.
• When you conjugate a verb you change the ending depending on the person you’re using, the tense and the mood.
• If the verb is irregular it has its own conjugation rules.
• In Spanish you also have reflexive verbs, they indicate when an action is performed over the subject itself and they always need a reflexive pronoun.
• The Present Tense can be used to:
  -Talk about actions that take place at the moment
  -Actions that take place frequently and
  -to express general truths.