There are three basic groups of Spanish verbs, in these articles we will look at the regular AR, ER and IR verbs.. In this part we will concentrate on regular ER and IR verbs in the present tense.
In Part 1,we learned that a verb is a “doing” word that covers everything from an action to an opinion, so sing, drink, eat,, like, dislike, love, kick, fall, smile, hear, write turn, are all examples of verbs. In the English language the verb is not changed by who is doing the action. An example would be;
“I like cheese”, “we like cheese” and “you like cheese”, the verb “like” stays the same. In Spanish the form of the verb is changed by who is doing the action.
In the first part we concentrated on regular verbs ending in the letters a and r. The other two groups of regular verbs are the verbs that end in er and ir.
Verbs Ending In ER
One of the words meaning to repair in Spanish is rehacer, if we want to say “ I repair cars” in Spanish, we drop the e and r from the end of rehacer and add an o, to give “rehaco los coches”(los coches, is literally the cars). There is no need for the Spanish word for I (Yo) at the beginning of the sentence because by adding the er, we have changed the verb to referrer it to me.
If we wanted to say “you repair cars” to one person, we would remove the er and add es. giving us “rehaces los coches”, there is no need to use tù (the Spanish for you) as the change to rehacer has already specified the subject of the sentence.
When we are learning basic Spanish verbs and wanting to say that he or she repairs cars, we can use “rehace los coches”, just add an e to the shortened rehacer. This is also the proper way to use the verb when talking to someone you’ve never met before or in a formal situation.
“We repair cars” can be said by the addition of emos to give us “rehacemos los coches”.
Still with us on this one? Well if we wanted to say “they repair cars”, we would drop the er and add en, to form “rehacen los coches”.
Lastly, if we are talking to a group when saying “you repair cars” we would remove the er and add éis, as so “ rehacéis los coches”
IR Verbs
Regular verbs ending in ir behave in the same way as regular er verbs in every case apart from one which we will get to, but let us look at the similarities first. The similarities are; for I (yo) drop the ir and add e, for you (tú) drop ir and add es, for he/she/formal version of you (él, ella, usted) drop the ir and add e, and you when addressing more than person drop the ir for en.
The exception to the rule that ir verbs are the same as er verbs can be seen if we use WE. I we use “we climb mountains” as an example, the Spanish for climb is subir , “we climb mountains” can be “subimos las sierras”, so here we have dropped the ir and replaced it with imos.
So thats how we learn basic Spanish verbs, I hope its been helpful, and also hope that this will be the start of of a larger appreciation of the Spanish language.