Este artículo está diseñado para ser leído por estudiantes que hacen clases de inglés que tengan un nivel básico (A1/A2). When speaking a new language, no doubt the most useful words to start learning are the verbs, the "action" words. If you know how to say "to eat" (comer), "to go" (ir) or "to say" (decir) then you can immediately start basically communicating with people.
"Eat pizza?"
Yes, please! This phrase is not very grammatical, but it communicates very effectively - you probably know exactly what it signifies!
But what if we want to communicate in more detail? Then we need to "Conjugate", or add more information to the verb.
Spanish communicates an enormous amount through verb conjugation. For example, "Comer", the basic form of the verb, only communicates "to eat" - there's no person, no implied tense (Tiempo verbal).
However, when you change "comer" into "como" it suddenly means "I eat". Now there is a person - "I" (yo).
The forms for all personal pronouns in the present tense are below:
- To Eat => Comer
- I Eat => Como
- You Eat => Comes
- (S)He Eats => Come
- We Eat =>Comemos
- They Eat => Comen
See that in English, the verb changes very little! We only need to add an "S" in the present tense. For this reason, it is different from Spanish because we always need to have personal pronouns for the verb (I, You, He, She, We, You, They).
This is because we do not "conjugate" the verb as much as in Spanish.
In summary: in the present tense, every verb only has two basic conjugations that change the form. In fact, besides "Irregular" verbs, the majority of verbs only have 3 or 4 different forms in total!
To compare, Spanish has 6 in the present tense - with multiple other tenses too!
In Conclusion
To express the same ideas in English, we use pronouns and auxiliary verbs which we will look at in another article!