Why not check out MY Spanish Verb Conjugation book, it covers all 2000 irregular Spanish verbs and is unbeatable value!

The other pages of this blog explain basic Spanish verb conjugation and inform you as to the tools you will require in order to make the task of learning and conjugating Spanish verbs as easy and as quick as possible.

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However, all these pages concentrate solely on the present tense, which is the obvious place to start, but it will not be long before you start to look at how to use verbs to express things that have happened in the past or are going to happen in the future.

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In order to do so you must understand tenses.

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There are many tenses in Spanish as there are in English but these can be whittled down to just four  that are an absolute necessity for the Spanish beginner to understand.

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They are:

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Present:

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The most commonly used tense and understandably the first learned by students.

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Future:

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Used to refer to events that haven’t happened yet

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Preterite:

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The preterite is one of two tenses used to refer to events in the past and is specifically used to describe something that happened at a specific.*

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Imperfect:

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The other of the two tenses used to refer to events in the past. The imperfect is used to refer to past events that happened at a non specific time.*

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*The actual explanation is a little more complicated than the one I have given but this simple explanation should give you enough of an idea.

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Again, the use of a Spanish verb conjugation book and a verb conjugator training program are vital to successfully learning these verb tenses, but to give you a feel for how these tenses are conjugated we will take the three regular verbs used on the homepage:

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Hablar (to speak); Comer (to eat) and Vivir (to live).

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However, to avoid repetition we will not show or explain the conjugation for the present tense on this page as it can be viewed on the homepage, so we will start with the future tense.

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Spanish Future Tense Conjugation:

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The future tense in Spanish is the easiest of all the tenses to learn as the endings, which are added onto the complete verb, are the same for each of the three verb groups and there are very few irregular verbs.

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Spanish Preterite (preterit) Tense Conjugation:

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The preterite is probably the most used past tense in Spanish. It uses the stem of the verb and the endings as shown below. Note that the –er and –ir verbs share the same endings. However, unlike the future tense there are a number of verbs that are irregular in the preterite and as is often the case, these are the most commonly used verbs.

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Spanish Imperfect Tense Conjugation:

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As with the preterite, the imperfect tenses uses the stem of the verb and the endings as shown. Note that the –er and –ir verbs again share the same endings. There are very few verbs that are irregular in the imperfect.

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For more information on the formation of Spanish verb tenses in particular, Spanish irregular verbs visit my main site irregularspanishverbs.com where you will find lots of useful information as well as verb conjugation sheets that you can easily download, for some of the most common irregular verbs.

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