Conjugating verbs (Spanish)?

Question

I'm not actually having trouble conjugating my verbs I'm having trouble keeping the different conjugations seperated in my mind. I know that the future tenses have the infinitive in them and the past ones have the most accent marks on them but that's the only way I can tell them apart. Is there any way for me learn which one is which. All of the tenses I need to know are the present, gerund, imperfect indicative, preterit, future, conditional, and imperative command.

What in the heck is an imperfect indicative and a conditional in English?

I know they're verb tenses. I just don't know what they are in English exactly. I probably use them in English all the time I just don't know what they are at this moment.

Come on someone has to have study tips.

Answer 1

My teacher taught us to them through song. Present is used for stuff that you do like if u say "i eat".Imperfect is a past tense, used for action imcomplete, old habits, and past descriptions such as weather age times feelings and day. the endings are the ia and aba endings. Preterite is also a past tense but is different from the imperfect because itz for uninterupted actions that began and ended. The endings are very strange with no ryhm or reason, but most of them have accents. future is used for actions your going to do. You can reconize this tense because it uses teh infinite of the verb and then has an ending such as hablare. The endings all have accents except nosotros. Conditional is used for actions that u would do, like saying i would go, but i have hw. These also have the infinitive, but have ia endings. imperative commands for tu positive have exclamation points and conjuagted in usted form. Tu negative, ud positive/negative and uds positive negative are conjugated in yo form first, than for ar verbs u add an e and for er verbs u add an a. Uds has an "n" after the a or e, while tu has an "s" i dont no what the gerund is.

Answer 2

I speak Spanish and majored in it and I have thought about what has helped me in learning the tenses. Unfortunately, no good 'tricks' or tips come to mind. I honest have to say that by learning "what the verbs were" (so to say) like knowing when to use them and how they 'translated' into English really helped in identifying them. Also, plain memorization. I would write all 16 tenses out on a particular word-just picked a word, listed the tenses I needed to conjugate into and did it. That definitely helped.
One book that was useful and you can get it on Amazon is called "Practice Makes Perfect-Spanish Verb Tenses". It is a workbook but it does a wonderful job of explaining all the tenses and can help you learn to memorize them.

To answer your other questions-

Imperfect Indicative would equal (using the verb 'make' in English) "was making","used to make" , or "made". Keep in mind that the imperfect indicative is a past tense verb form used most often to describe conditions as they existed in the past, to provide background about events, describe habitual actions, to express continuous or customary actions in past time and to express an action in the past which was occurring when another action intervened.
Think of it in some cases as the action being 'unfinished' (If that makes any sense).
Ex:
Cuando yo vivía en Mexico hablaba español todo el tiempo.
When I lived/or was living in Mexico I spoke/used to speak Spanish all the time.

Now the Spanish conditional is a little harder to 'translate' into English. But the best way would be to equate it to 'would'. Now, it doesn't always refer to a specific period of time. And even though the name suggests it's used when there's a condition involved, in Spanish it also has some close ties with the future tense. But fortunately, in most cases we use "would" in English, we use the conditional in Spanish, and vice versa as well.

Try the links below-

I hope this helps!

Answer 3

I would highly recommend taking a Spanish course because there are wayy too many verb tenses, which have separate conjugations for each type of verb (AR, ER, IR). Not to mention, there are regular and irregular verbs.

Answer 4

Imperfect indicative

verb sonreir = to smile

yo sonreía
tú/vos sonreías
él/ella/usted sonreía
nosotros sonreíamos
vosotros sonreíais
ellos(as), ustedes sonreían

it is sort of I was doing something while you were doing something else.

so, Yo sonreía, mientras tú veías televisión.
I was smiling, while you were watching TV.

conditional
(let´s go on with the verb sonreir)

yo sonreiría
tú/vos sonreirías
él/ella/usted sonreiría
nosotros sonreiríamos
vosotros sonreirías
ellos(as)/ustedes sonreirían

it means I would do something if you would do something else

Yo sonreiría si tú comieras.
I would smile if you would eat.

Answer 5

I don't want to sound rude. Far from it. I do want to help you. But how can I tell a person how to differentiate between the different conjugations if they don't even know what the names of the tenses are?

Imperfect and conditional are verb tenses.
:-)))

Answer 6

tricky thing. lookup on search engines like google. that may help!