Transcription
Hey, que la que, mi gente. Rocky here from Speak Spanish Faster.
En el video de hoy, yo te voy a dar una actividad que puedas ultinice our Parra Ugarte con la con who gasps young de los verbos in espanol. In today's video, I'm going to be giving you an activity and exercise that you can use to help you with conjugating Spanish verbs.
Now, we all know that it is important to learn how to conjugate Spanish verbs. And even though I teach students that, hey, when you're getting started, don't worry so much about the conjugations. Just worry about getting a lot of input, worried about learning words, different vocabulary words, and then the conjugation will come. But eventually, you will have to learn how to properly conjugate, you know, verbs in Spanish if you want to master the Spanish language, if you want to speak Spanish fluently, and if you want to just simply speak Spanish correctly.
Now, when students learn in a traditional setting, like in school, we spend all our time doing conjugation exercises and practice and getting ready for tests, and it doesn't really translate to speaking. So I think when learning Spanish, you have to be listening a lot, and you have to be learning these vocabulary words. But again, eventually, you're gonna have to reach the point where you have to learn the conjugation. So I think school approaches this the wrong way, where they teach you all the conjugations first before you even really learn the language. I think that's a mistake. But then there's another big mistake in the way that they teach conjugation that really takes you forever, and I will get to that mistake in just a second. And then I will show you instead what you should do to learn conjugation faster.
But with all this being said, again, I don't want you to just focus on conjugations every single day. Yes, they are an important part of mastering the language. But first, nothing is very important that every day you are getting an ample amount of Spanish input, hearing a lot of Spanish, reading Spanish, before you really dive into this conjugation. But for most students, you have had a basic background in Spanish, you've heard a lot of Spanish, you might even be able to understand some, and now you're getting into the speaking, and you want to make sure that you are speaking properly and use all the words the right way. So that's when the conjugation training that I'm about to show you will come into play.
Now, here's how we learn conjugation in school, and this way is very, very ineffective. Okay? So in Spanish one, maybe like after we learn the ABCs and stuff, they start teaching us present tense conjugation, and we pretty much spend the whole Spanish one, I think, on present tense conjugation. Now, a whole year passes. In year two, we learn past tense conjugation. We might not even learn future tense conjugation until year three. So for many students, when learning in school, it's not until three years later that you learn how to say "I will go here" or "I will talk to you." Like, we don't even learn how to say that until three years of Spanish, and it makes it pretty much impossible to properly communicate with people when it takes us years to learn conjugations.
So again, how it works is we usually spend all semester or a few months on one tense. So let's just say the present tense. Let's take the present tense, what we spend all the time learning how to say things in the present tense for every single verb individually. So each day, we're learning how to conjugate this verb, how to do this verb, AR verb, ER verb for present tense, and we practice that for a year. Then the next year, we come back. Now we are on the preterite, the preterite tense, the imperfect tense, talking in the past. Then we come back the next year, and we're learning about the future tense and out of things, say things in the future. And then during that year, we might touch on the subjunctive, and we might touch on all these other tenses that are in Spanish, right? And it takes us years to fully get a grasp of how to properly conjugate verbs so that we can speak Spanish properly.
So what we're going to do is we're going to flip this process on its head, and we're going to do the opposite of what you've probably been taught in school, and I promise you, this is really going to help you learn conjugation much faster. Okay? So instead of spending years on one tense, what we are going to do is we are going to spend a week or two on one verb. Let's take an AR verb, for example. Let's take the word "bailar," all right, to dance. This is a regular AR verb. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a regular AR verb, a regular ER verb, and a regular IR verb. Now, if you already have a little grasp of conjugation, you can do all three. Pick one verb of each. But if you're new to conjugation, just pick one verb. So let's just say one AR verb. Let's start with the word "bailar." Start with a regular AR verb, or a regular ER verb, or a regular IR verb.
Now, for the verb "bailar," we have:
Yo: bailo
Tú: bailas
Él, Ella, Usted: baila
Nosotros: bailamos
Vosotros: bailáis
Ellos, Ellas, Ustedes: bailan
And this is the vosotros form. You don't really have to, if you're not going to Spain, then you don't even need to pay attention to the vosotros form because they really only use it in Spain. It's not used in Latin America or in Caribbean Spanish. But I don't want to leave it out. And then we have "bailan" for yo dance, or they dance, or the the boys dance, the girls dance, y'all dance in the ustedes form. All right. So now we know how to say "I dance," "you dance," "he, she, or you (in the formal) dance," "we dance," "y'all dance," and then "they dance" or "y'all dance" in the formal sense. But ustedes form is the form that you will hear for y'all in Latin America and the Caribbean. Again, now we know how to say "I dance," and we look at the rules for this AR verb. What happens with this verb? All right. So for instance, let's just take the yo form, "bailo." For "bailar," we remove the AR and we simply add an "o" for the yo form. All right. "Bailas," we remove the AR and we we add an "as" there. So you do this throughout all these. Again, this is a regular AR verb. When I say regular verb, that means all the regular conjugations will follow the same pattern. So I'll get to that in a second.
But now, let's say we look at the next tense for this same word, and now we're going to look at how to say "bailar" or the word "I danced" instead in the past. So "I danced," the preterite. So in the past tense, we have:
Yo: bailé
Tú: bailaste
Él, Ella, Usted: bailó
Nosotros: bailamos
Vosotros: bailasteis
Ellos, Ellas, Ustedes: bailaron
So we have these basic rules, and all AR verbs will follow these same rules that you see here. All right. Now, again, we can do this for the next tense, the imperfect tense, and we can do this for the future tense. Now, when we learn all these rules for this one AR verb, you will know how to use every single regular AR verb. So now, if you know how to say "I dance," or "I danced," or "I used to dance," you will know how to say "I talked," "I talked," or "I used to talk" because the word "hablar" follows the same exact rules as "bailar." So when you master the AR tense, the AR verb conjugations for all the tenses at once, you now will be able to use any word that is a regular AR verb.
In this, if you do this each day, it might take you a week to really learn these tenses. If you spend like 30 minutes a day learning these, in about a week or two, you will know all the AR verb tenses. Now, let's say you take another week or two for the ER, and another week or two for the IR. Now, within three to six weeks, you've mastered all the conjugations for regular verbs. And regular verbs, I don't know the exact number, but if we go on the basic per the basic 80/20 rule, then I would say 80% of Spanish verbs are regular, and about 20% maybe even less than that are irregular. So you already know about 80% of verbs. You know how to conjugate them properly in any tense in a few weeks. Now, that's not to mention, yes, you will have to take some time and learn some of these irregular verbs. But once you have a general understanding of how these all the conjugation tenses work, learning those will not be that difficult.
So again, we're going to flip things on its head. Instead of spending two months to learn one tense, we're going to spend a month to learn all the tenses at once. And when you do it like this, by focusing, just remember, just focus on one word. All right? Just focus on one word at a time. Now, make sure again that you are learning a regular AR verb, and a regular ER verb, and a regular IR verb, because when you master these, that will help you learn all the other regular verb conjugations because they all are regular verbs because they follow the same exact rules. And this will drastically help you learn conjugations much, much faster.
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