Spanish Verbs  Welcome to Spanish 1010! I hope you enjoy your time in class.  This introductory presentation will review two key concepts: conjugation and agreement. Feel free to skip this presentation if you are already familiar with these terms.

Identifying Verbs  Let’s begin with a few English verbs!

Every day I wake up at 6:00.  The verb describes the state or action.  Every complete sentence needs a verb. Imagine trying to make sense out of “Every day I up at 6:00.”  Every complete sentence also needs a subject – the who? part of the sentences. Imagine trying to make sense out of “Every day wake up at 6:00.”

Every morning I wake up at 6:00.  You can identify the verb by making some changes to the sentence. Change the subject and see what happens. In this case, change “I” to “she” and see what happens.

Every morning she wakes up…  The word wake changed to wakes because we are talking about a different person.

Every morning I wake up at 6:00.  This trick doesn’t always tell us which word is the verb, because English verbs don’t change very often.  To illustrate, change the subject of the original sentence to “we,” “you,” and “they.”

We wake up / You wake up…  The verb wake doesn’t change!  So there is another way to check for the verb: change the time.  Let’s do that by changing “Every morning” to “yesterday.”

Yesterday I woke up at 6:00.  The word that changed was wake, so that is the verb.  You can also change the time to “tomorrow” and wake will change again.

Tomorrow I will wake up at 7:00.  To review, there are two tricks you can use to tell which is the verb: change the subject and change the time. There is more to verbs than what you’ve seen here, but this will get your started.

Conjugations  When we make changes to a verb, we call it conjugating.  English verbs have different forms: go, goes, went, gone, going.  When we have to decide between “go” and “goes,” we are conjugating the verb “go.”

Agreement  Of course, it’s important to get the right form! You can’t say “She go” any more than you can say “I goes.” When you put the correct forms together, it’s called agreement.

That’s all, folks!  Now you are ready to work on the first Spanish verb set #2 SER.