After taking a few minutes to look at Spanish verbs, you will find that beneath the surface they are full of surprises. Verbs which do not follow the dominant conjugation scheme are called irregular verbs, and they are extremely common in Spanish just as they are in English. This guide will help prepare you to encounter these tricksters in the wild and understand their irregular ways. For more on the different person categories and personal pronouns in Spanish, see this guide.
They're easy to learn. So the stems of hablar , deber , and vivir are habl- , deb- , and viv-. When dealing with regular verbs, you never change the stem. All you do is remove the infinitive suffix and add an ending like -o or -as. Pay close attention to the stem:. In the first, second, third, and sixth forms, the vowel in the stem changes from e to ie.
Other than that, everything is as normal — the endings are what you would expect if the verb was regular. It might seem confusing that the stem only changes in four of the six verb forms. The stem is unstressed : in both of these cases, the stress goes on the second syllable. The vowel in the stem of a stem-changing verb only changes in those conjugations where that vowel is stressed.
But it's better if you understand why this is the case. To understand why the stem's vowel is stressed in some verb forms and unstressed in others, see this detailed explanation of accents and word stress in Spanish. I'll start with the categories. First of all, you have verbs which change an e to an ie. We've already seen cerrar above, which follows this pattern. Some of the most important similar verbs are:. Secondly, verbs which change an o to a ue. The third common category of stem-changing verb is that of verbs that change an e to an i.
The four simplest and most common — go verbs are:. The verbs hacer, poner, and valer are all regular — er verbs with an irregular yo form that ends in — go. Tables 5, 6, and 7 show how to conjugate each verb. Salir is a — go verb like poner, hacer, and valer. The next two verbs, caer to fall and traer to bring , follow the regular — er verb patterns of a — go verb, except for the irregular yo form, which adds an i to the conjugated form, as shown in Tables 9 and Normally you can't predict that a verb will be irregular in its yo form unless you already know the verb.
There is one rule that is consistent, however. If the infinitive of the verb ends in a vowel followed by — cer or — cir, the yo form of the verb ends in — zco.
Here are the infinitive forms of some of the most common —zco verbs:. Hacer breaks all the rules in all the tenses, except, nicely, the present tense—apart from yo. Other verbs that follow exactly the same pattern include deshacer undo and satisfacer satisfy. Puse los libros en los estantes. I put the books on the shelves. Decir is conjugated in the same way as bendecir to bless and maldecir to curse or insult. He says the world is bad.
Se dice que es mejor comer un buen desayuno. She saw the movie on Monday. Bienquerer to be fond of and malquerer to dislike conjugate in the same way. Like many irregular verbs, saber is irregular in the first person present tense and its stem in the past tense consistently changes to u.
He knows all the answers. The main way llegar is irregular is that its e changes to ue in the present subjunctive. Llego a Caracas el jueves. I arrive in Caracas on Thursday. Creer shares its conjugation pattern with a number of verbs, including desposeer to dispossess , desproveer to deprive , poseer to own , proveer to provide and sobreseer to discontinue. Its present tense is regular. No todo el mundo cree en Dios.
0コメント