May 13, 2010

Conjugating the Spanish Future Tense

The future tense in Spanish is most definitely one of the easier of all tenses in Spanish to study because there are basically only 12 commonly used verbs considered to be irregular.

The Spanish future tense is a rarity as far as tenses are concerned in Spanish because it is reasonably regular when conjugated. There are relatively few verbs that are physically irregular Spanish verbs.

What is an even bigger surprise is that these small number of irregular verbs, are not too difficult to learn as they each follow a easily recognized formation making Spanish verb conjugation much simpler…more about that later to start with however, I will initially cover the conjugation of regular verbs in the future tense.

The first big point is that each of the verb groups, the -er, -ir and -ar verb groups, have different endings in most of the other tenses in Spanish, in the future tense they all share exactly the same endings! These endings are joined to the infinitive of the verb being conjugated. For example:

Hablar - ‘to speak‘

hablaré I will speak
hablarás you will speak
hablará he, she or it will speak
hablaremos we will speak
hablaréis you will speak (plural)
hablarán they will speak

This conjugation applies to all verbs in Spanish as already mentioned but there are a small number of irregular verbs that are often used. As with the regular verbs the endings are exactly the same, however what makes these verbs irregular is that there are irregularities in the stem of each of them. Thankfully, these irregular stem changes are used throughout the conjugation, so even the irregular verbs are pretty regular!

The irregular verbs in the future tense, accompanied by the irregular stem change are:

caber ‘to fit’ or ‘to be possible’ - caber becomes cabr
decir ‘to say’ - decir becomes dir
haber ‘to have’ - haber becomes habr
hacer ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ - hacer becomes har
poder ‘to be able to’ or ‘can’ - poder becomes podre
poner ‘to put’ - poner becomes pondr
querer ‘to want’ - querer becomes querr
saber ‘to know’ - saber becomes sabr
salir ‘to leave’ - salir becomes saldr
tener ‘to have’ - tener becomes tendr
valer ‘to cost’ - valer becomes valdr
venir ‘to come’ - venir becomes vendr

Remember that the irregular future tense verbs listed above are conjugated the same as for regular verbs and that the irregular stems are used instead of the full infinitive.