All English speakers should understand what verbs are and what they are used for and most will understand that a verb is what tells people whether an action is being performed now, in the past or in the future. What an English verb does not relay is who the doer of the action and this is the major difference between English and Spanish verb construction.

The reason why so many people find Spanish verbs so difficult to master is that they are so much more complicated than their English counterparts and this is because each conjugation of each verb tells us when an action has taken part and who performs the action, although there are occasions when there is a degree of ambiguity, but more of that later.

Basic Structure of a Spanish Verb

The first point that should be explained is that of the structure of a verb in Spanish. In English we recognize a verb because it has the preposition to in front of it, for example to eat, and the combination of to and the verb is commonly known as the infinitive. In Spanish the infinitive is a single word, although it does have two parts called the stem and the ending. The ending is often referred to as the equivalent of to in English and can be either -ar, -er or -ir. These endings are important as they are used to group Spanish verbs into three specific groups called, imaginably, the -ar, -er and -ir verb groups. Each group follows a set of specific rules for conjugation as highlighted here.

Present tense conjugation of hablar: regular -ar verb meaning to speak

• yo hablo - I speak
• tú hablas - you speak