Irregular Spanish Verbs:
What Are Spanish Verb Conjugators?
Spanish verb conjugators, if you don't know already, are study aids that will help you to learn and improve your mastery of the formation, use and spelling of Spanish verbs. They are an invaluable tool when learning any language not only Spanish, as they will usually provide easy to understand information relating to all the various conjugations.
There are two things that define a good verb conjugator; the first and most important is the ease with which a student can use it! Verb conjugators that are too complicated to use will ultimately make learning verbs more difficult and that should be looked upon as unacceptable, especially when there are alternatives that provide the complete opposite.
Secondly, verb conjugation books are numerous but if you want one that covers every verb you will ever use you will need to pay quite a lot to own one. Most conjugation books that can be bought over the counter are fine, but as your studies become more advanced you will find many of them are found wanting and fall a long way short of what you will actually need. Eventually, what usually happens, is that you will end up with a shelf full of books that differ by 5% from the each other!
Most conjugation books cover only the most commonly used irregular verbs and are padded out with regular verbs that all follow the exact same conjugation pattern. Generally, Spanish verb conjugation books are no different!
Why would anyone want to have a book compiled of 200 verbs, for example, of which 150 are regular verbs that all have the same conjugation pattern...it doesn't make sense and is a complete waste of YOUR money.
Forget what you may have heard about there being only twenty five irregular Spanish verbs, in fact there are well in excess of two thousand irregular spanish verbs and they follow over 70 different patterns of irregularity, so the necessity for a good Spanish verb conjugator to help you in your studies cannot be stressed enough.
Many of these 2000 verbs are quite obscure and it is unlikely you will use them in every day conversation but, to say there are only 25 irregular Spanish verbs is ridiculous, and grossly misleading. With over 2000 irregular Spanish verbs, the use of a good Spanish verb conjugator will make the task of finding the right information much easier and a whole lot quicker.
A good Spanish verb conjugator should list every verb you could ever need and should also cover all derivatives of each tense.
In Spanish there are three regular verb types, and these are referred to as '-ar verbs', '-ir verbs' and '-er verbs', so called because of the endings they each have. The endings are basically the equivalent of the English 'to', and the preceding part is commonly referred to as the stem of the verb. For example in English, when we refer to a verb we precede the verb with 'to', but in general use the 'to' is dropped when the verb is attached to a pronoun; to speak becomes he speaks and to do becomes he does; etc, etc
In Spanish it is no different; when the verb is not related to a pronoun it takes on its original full form, but if attached to a pronoun its ending changes. For example; hablar (to speak) changes to hablo (I speak), hablas (you speak), habla (he, she, or you [polite] speaks) etc, etc.
Regular Spanish verbs become relatively easy to conjugate as they all follow the same patterns and rules of conjugation, but irregular Spanish verbs are far more difficult to master and the use of an excellent Spanish verb conjugator really makes a huge difference to the ease and the speed at which you will learn.
As mentioned already, there are many Spanish verb conjugators available online but there are no better downloadable conjugation books dealing with irregular verbs than '2000+ Spanish Irregular Verbs 2nd edition' nor is there any better conjugation program than 'Verbarrator' and you can check out the reviews for each right here.
