The Spanish Verb Haber, the Most Important Spanish Verb

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Spanish Verb Haber

As you are no doubt aware, Spanish verbs are probably the hardest and the most complicated parts of the Spanish language to learn. There are three main Spanish verb groups, the -ar, -er and -ir verb groups. Every verb is conjugated and has multiple endings that will each alter the verb to indicate who is performing the action, these endings will also change depending on when an action happens, this is called tense. As if these changes were not difficult enough there are a large number of irregular verbs that have specific verb patterns, some completely unique, that must also be learnt and most of these are used regularly.

The complexities of Spanish tenses is what causes many issues and it is hardly surprising considering that there are 16 of them, each conjugated differently. These 16 tenses are broken down into two groups of 8 called simple tenses and perfect or ‘compound’ tenses and it is these compound tenses that use a certain verb that many people, including myself, believe to be the most important verb in the Spanish language.

In Spanish there are four main types of verb; the regular, irregular, reflexive and auxiliary verbs and there is one  specific auxiliary verb that is used more than any other verb in Spanish and that verb is haber which is translated as ‘to have‘.

Obtaining a good working knowledge and fully understanding how haber is conjugated is vital as it makes it possible to use verbs much more extensively, this is because haber is used, along with past participles, in every compound tense of every verb.

The compound tenses are tenses that describe a task that has been completed, for example:

• I have been;
• I had been;
• I was;
• I will have been and,
• I would have been,

are all compound, or perfect, tenses that use haber as an auxiliary verb.

Both the English and Spanish languages use an auxiliary verb in the same way when using the perfect tenses, both languages use an auxilary verb followed by the past participle (el participio in Spanish).

In English, the past participle is typically formed by adding -ed to the end of verbs; the Spanish participle however, which has origins related to the English participle, is typically formed by adding -ado for -ar verbs, and -ido for -er and -ir verbs.

The verb tense, in the perfect tenses, is decided by which simple tense of haber is being used: for example if we said: ‘I have eaten’ and ‘I will have eaten’ the only way to distinguish between the two would be the tense of the auxiliary verb being used; ‘I have eaten’ = he comido and ‘I will have eaten’ = habré comido.

It isn’t feasible to show the complete conjugation of haber for each and every tense in Spanish as there are so many but the example below shows how haber is used, in conjunction with a past participle, in this case the past participle of the verb andar, meaning ‘to walk’, in the first person singular for each of the perfect tenses:

Indicative Tenses

• Present Perfect             he andado I have walked
• Pluperfect                       había andado I had walked
• Past Perfect                    hube andado I walked
• Future Perfect               habré andado I will have walked
• Conditional Perfect     habría andado I would have walked

Subjunctive

• Present Perfect         haya andado I have walked
• Pluperfect                   hubiera or hubiese andado I had walked
• Future Perfect           hubiera andado I will have walked

So there you have it, the Spanish verb haber, is the most used verb in Spanish and as such rightfully earns the honor of being the most important as well. Obviously, the use of a full conjugation sheet for the verb haber would make the use of this auxiliary verb a great deal easier to understand and you can download or print off such a sheet here http://www.irregularspanishverbs.com/haber.html

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Haber is a difficult verb to learn and a verb training program will help you master it quickly. For the very best in verb training software I suggest you check out my review of the Verbarrator here. Or if you would like some further reading check out my last post about using the Spanish Future Tense.

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