by Frederick A. Babb

Created on: April 21, 2010

Spanish is a language for which expressing is almost poetic.  The more I learned Spanish, the more I appreciated the true beauty of the language.  However, when it comes to verbs, Spanish is far more difficult than English.  To give an example, we will us the verb “caminar”. 

“Caminar” can be translated into “To walk”.   Spanish has six different forms of the present tense as well as the infinite tense.  Caminar written and spoken as such is the infinitive sense.  Then there is the three single and three plural forms of the verb. 

First person singular is camino, second person singular is caminas and third person singular is camina.  As is with most Spanish verbs, the difference between second and third person singular is the second person carries and “s” at the end and the third person does not.

First person plural is caminamos, second person singular is caminais and third person plural is caminan.  Again, for most Spanish verbs, we will see first person plural ending in –mos, second person plural ending in –is and third person plural ending in –n.  While Spanish verbs can be confusing, using these simple rules helps to better learn the language.

Without going too far in depth of all the possible different presences of the verb, I will provide the past and future tenses as well as the conditional and present perfect tenses.   For the future, first person singular is caminaré, second person singular is caminarás and third person singular is caminará.   For the third person we use in, first person caminaremos, second person caminaréis and third person caminarán.   

In the past, first person singular is caminé, second person singular is caminaste and third person singular is caminó.   When using in third person we would say the following:  first person  caminamos, second person caminasteis and third person caminaron.   

Moving on to the conditional form, we would correctly translate the verb in each of the following forms.  For first person singular, caminaría is correct, for second person singular, caminarías is correct and for third person singular we would use caminaría.  In third person form the three forms are caminaríamos for first person plural, caminaríais for second person plural and caminarían for third person plural.

Finally, we will look briefly at the present perfect forms of using the verb.  In first person singular, we have “he caminado”, for second person singular we use “has caminado” and the correct form for third person singular is “ha caminado”.  Again, in the plural form we have a different form which as follows:  For first person plural the translation is “hemos caminado”, second person plural is “habéis caminado” and third person plural is “han caminado”.

As you can see, this verb, as almost all verbs in Spanish, are quite a bit more complicated to learn and use.  The most common error non-Spanish speakers make when learning Spanish is the incorrect form for the verb.  If you are learning Spanish, don’t worry about make such an error because there were many before you and will be many after you making the same blunder.  The important part is being able to someday learn to speak this expressive language.

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