Verb Conjugations
I need help on verb conjucations. I do not understand it what so ever. One example is what would you change, how do you know what to change, and why in this sentence:
Qeremos jugar (al) beisbol
7 Answers
A verb conjugation is nothing more than a morpheme (simple letter or sound combinations which convey a meaning) or combination of morphemes which are added to the verb root in order to convey certain information about the action that is described by the verb. Often, this morphemic combination is tacked onto the end of the verb root as a suffix. When this occurs, the verb is said to be in one of its inflected forms and each inflected form often conveys certain basic information (conveyed by it's morphemes) which often can be broken down into several simple categories: Tense, mood, aspect, number, person and voicing.
In general, languages vary from one another in terms of their respective morphemic richness. As a result, some languages (especially more heavily inflected languages) may rely very heavily on conjugated verb forms to convey each of these ideas; whereas, other languages may instead rely more heavily on other devices such as word positioning, the use of verb phrases (often referred to as either compound tenses or verbal perífrases, depending on what nuance is being conveyed) or other parts of speech to convey such ideas.
It might help to first examine each of these ideas one by one.
Tense
In a basic sense, the tense of a verb points to the time at which the action occurs in relation to the time of speaking. In this sense, tenses are often broken down into three broad categories: Present, past and future.
Person and Number
Person can often be thought of as referring to the person(s) or thing(s), in relation to the speaker, which carries out the action designated by the verb. Number, simply defines whether such action was carried out by a single individual or by multiple individuals (some languages make additional distinctions, but knowing these is not necessary here). The combination of person and number is often used to delineate the subject of a sentence. In the English system of grammar, we do not rely on verbal morphemes to make this distinction but instead rely on the word order and the use of subject pronouns where necessary. Spanish, in contrast, conjugates its verbs to convey the information of both the person and number and as a result, in Spanish you will, more often than not, find subject pronouns to be omitted in speech.
Aspect
Verbal aspect is a complicated idea, and is intimately tied with such concepts as tense and mood. In a very basic sense (and here, I emphasize the word basic), verbal aspect can be thought of to mark the difference between an imperfective action (i.e. progressive/ongoing/habitual action) and a perfective action (i.e. a finite action with a clearly defined beginning or end). In a sense, it describes how the action is occurring over time and its relation to the point in time being referred to by the tense of the verb. Again the idea of aspect is fairly complicated, and the concept actually gives rise to various other subcategories, but understanding the basic idea behind it might be worth looking into because it can really help in understanding certain nuances of the language including such (sometimes difficult) topics as verbal perífrasis and imperfect vs preterit (past). Often, in both Spanish and English, certain auxiliary verbs are combined with a noninflected verb form (past participle/participio pasado, infinitive/infinitivo, present participle/gerundio1) to form a verb phrase (in some cases referred to as a compound tense). In such cases the noninflected form carries the lexical meaning and the auxiliary verb carries (at least most of) the inflectional meaning. Take, for example, the present perfect (auxiliary ? have || lexical ? want) which is often used to report a past action or state that touches in some way on the present or that perhaps began in the past but extends into the present—I have wanted to play baseball for some time now. It is probably worth noting, however, that there is a slight difference in regards to aspect between the English and Spanish present perfect.
Mood
Mood is another somewhat complex subject especially considering there are distinct differences (relating to morphology) in the way in which mood is handled between English and Spanish. In Spanish, mood is usually divided into three basic categories: Indicative, Subjunctive and Imperative. The imperative is fairly simple and can be thought of as the language of commands (Go do this! Eat this! Don't do that!, etc). The distinction between the indicative and subjunctive is a bit more complicated, and I will not get into it here, but often the distinction can be compacted into a single dichotomy—is the action conveyed by the verb meant to be taken as a declaration (indicative) or as a hypothetical/contrary-to-fact condition (subjunctive). Again, this is probably a bit of an oversimplification, but often serves well for practical applications.
Voice
In both Spanish and English, the voicing (difference between active and passive sentences) is generally not conveyed by inflectional verb forms. Instead, to indicate the passive voice, the lexical verb is preceded by either a specific verb (Spanish ? ser || English ? to be) or, in the case of Spanish, a designated pronoun (se). Quite simply, the difference between active and passive can be best understood by illustration:
?We want a pizza. [active]
?A pizza is wanted (by us). [passive]
With basic terminology out of the way lets have a look at what is going on with the verb specific to you question, "queremos." In this case we can break the verb apart as follows:
| Quer- | Verb Stem | Conveys lexical meaning or dictionary definition of the verb (i.e. names the action of "wanting") |
| -emos | Verb conjugation/flexion | Morphemic combination which defines the number, person, tense, mood and, to a certain extent, aspect |
In this case, each particular category can be broken down as:
| Person | first person | ? | Indicates that the speaker is performing the action of "wanting" |
| Number | plural | ? | Indicates that the speaker is accompanied by at least one more individual in performing the action of "wanting" |
| Tense | present | ? | Marks the temporal point of reference for the action in the present |
| Mood | indicative | ? | Indicates that the act of "wishing" is declarative in nature |
| Aspect | imperfective | ? | Indicates an action 'in progress' or which occurs repeatedly or habitually over time* |
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It should be noted that across the two languages, the parts of speech listed do not perform identical functions and should not be confused with one another. ↩
I get that but i dont understand conjucation what so ever what does it mean
Complicated answer: Wikipedia- Grammatical Conjugation:
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories.
To put it a bit more simply- conjugation is what you do to a verb to give it additional shades of meaning.
For instance with the verb "to be":
You can say I am, he is, they are, etc. by conjugating the forms to match the subject.
You can say I am, I was, I will be, to match the timing.
You can get quite complex in shades of meaning: I could be, I have been, I had been, I will have been, I could have been, I would have been, etc.
In Spanish, more meaning is embeded in the verb endings than in English (although "haber" is used in a manner similiar to the use of "to have" as an auxilary verb in English).
So in your sentence "queremos" is the conjugated verb (conjugated in the first person plural present indicative- meaning definitely, currently, and "we"), jugar remains unconjugated, and the object follows.
In the English sentence "we want to play baseball"- in a very similiar manner, the verb "to want" is conjugated to "want", the verb "to play" remains unconjugated, and the object likewise follows. In the English sentence, you need to put "we", because "want" can also be used with "you" and "they". In the Spanish sentence you do not generally use "nosotros" (unless you are really trying to emphasize it) because it would be redundant- that information is already contained within the verb conjugation.
I was not an English major, so I am sure our grammarians can poke holes in this, but it is my best attempt.
I will try to answer really simply: Conjugation is when the form of the verb changes according to who is doing the action. For example...
Hablar = to talk
Yo hablo = I talk
Tú hablas = you (informal) talk
el/ella/usted habla = he/she/you (formal) talks
nosotros hablamos = we talk
vosotros hablaís = you all (informal) talk
ellos/ellas/ustedes hablan = they/ you all (formal) talk
See how the verb hablar (to talk) changes it's form depending on who is talking? There is a certain pattern to it that most verbs follow, depending on whether the verb ends in ar, er, or ir.
The sample sentence you give is "Queremos jugar al beisbol. Queremos is from the verb Querer, meaning "to want". So your sentence says "We want to play baseball."
To rewrite the sentence, conjugating the verb querer, you would change it's form to show who is wanting to play baseball. In this case (querer), the verb is a bit irregular and changes it's stem from quer to quier for some of the people. So the conjugation looks like this:
Yo quiero
Tú quieres
el/ella/ud. quiere
nosotros queremos
vosotros quereís
ellos/ellas/ustedes quieren
Because the verb itself changes and shows who is doing the action, you don't need to put the Yo, Tú, etc in front of it.
Queremos jugar al beisbol. We want to play baseball.
Quiero jugar al basebol. I want to play baseball.
Quieren jugar al basebol. They want to play baseball.
I hope this helps. Are you taking Spanish in school or just trying to learn it here?
I strongly suggest you buy a book called "501 Spanish Verbs" or something similar. All the verbs are conjugated for all the tenses and moods, and there are good explanations of the different tenses. This book really helped me and I still use it a lot for reference.
I don't know if this is any part of your problem, but I struggle with verbs in Spanish because I don't know always what tense it is in English. I speak English perfectly well, but never really learned things like pluperfect, etc. I have Goggled some of the terms and I'm still trying to learn more about what they mean. The most helpful to me are sites that teach people who are learning English. Hang in there and keep asking questions.
I get that but i dont understand conjucation what so ever what does it mean
If you have a spanish textbook, there should be an appendix in the back with conjugations of some common verbs.
