The present tense is used is the English equivalent of the present simple and the present progressive, so we use the present tense is used to report an action that is happening.
The basics of verbs in Spanish
- Infinitive: refers to the pure form of the verb, it is the English equivalent of “to see”, “to read”, “to love”.
- Infinitive ending: in Spanish all infinitive verbs have three possible endings “-ar”, “-er” or “-ir”.
- Base of the verb: when we see a verb in its infinitive form and remove the ending (“-ar”, “-er” or “-ir”.) we have the base of the verb or it is also known as the root. That base is what allows us to conjugate any of them.
- Conjugated verb: this consists of taking the root of the verb and adding the ending that corresponds to the subject in the sentence.
- Regular verbs: these are verbs that are conjugated in a predictable and constant way, they do not present alterations of any kind in their base.
- Irregular verbs: verbs whose conjugation differs from that which we can apply to regular verbs, making them a little more complicated to memorize.
- The subject: the person or thing that performs the action in the sentence, and based on that individual we will conjugate the verb.
Questions in Spanish
To ask questions, the place of the verb and the subject are exchanged, although it is also possible to ask a question without changing the place of the verb and the subject, but the intonation of the sentence changes and it is possible to understand that it is a question. For both ways of asking questions, it is necessary to use the question marks
Expressing future with the present tense
We can express a future action with the present tense by adding an adverbial expression that indicates that the action will take place later. The sentence will be exactly the same, but the adverb will be added.
Negative sentences
To create a negative sentence in Spanish in the present tense, all we need to do is to add the word “no” before the verb.