grammar terms i dont understand
I am having trouble with the terms you guys use such as "conjugation" and "2nd,3rd person plural" i dont know what that means? Can you explain it please
3 Answers
You may remember learning about verbs at school? Action words? Well each verb has a basic form called an infinitive. In English they all begin with 'to' - eg. 'to eat', 'to walk', to be' etc. In Spanish, infinitives are just one word but you can spot them because they all end in one of these three endings '-ar, -er, or -ir'. Eg. comer (to eat), andar or caminar (to walk), ser (to be), escribir (to write) etc.
As you can see those verb infinitives just tell us what the action is but they don't tell us when the action happens or who does the action - that's what we need conjugation for. That's just a fancy word for changing the verb infinitive so that it gives some more information.
So we take 'to eat' and we conjugate it in the present tense like this ...
I 'eat'.
You 'eat'.
He 'eats'.
She 'eats'.
We 'eat'.
They 'eat'.
As you can see the verb hardly changes (only in the third person singular actually but more about that below 
) but when it comes to conjugating Spanish verbs there are many more changes.
'Comer' (to eat) in Spanish is conjugated in the present tense like this.
Yo como (I eat)
Tú comes (you eat)
Él come (he eats)
Nosotros comemos (we eat)
Ellos comen (they eat)
Ustedes comen (you pl. eat)
There are also other conjugations to express the actions happening at different times, such as 'the past', 'the future etc'. Eg. I ate = comí, I will eat, comeré etc.
Now as you can see, there are lots of possible people that can do actions - I, you, he, she, we, they etc, etc.
These people or combinations of them are put into groups and are given the following titles:
Yo (I, singular), Nosotros (we, plural) - 1st person = the person speaking.
Tú and Usted (you, singular), Ustedes (you, plural) - 2nd person = the person being spoken to
Él (he, singular), ella (she, singular), ellos (they, plural) 3rd person = anyone other than 1 or 2 (a person being spoken about)
I hope that helps you to understand but feel free to ask any other questions that you may have.
Person:
Person refers the grammatical distinction between participants in a given event or action. Both Spanish and English recognize three distinct categories:
- First person: The speaker
- Second person: The addressee
- Third person: Any other person(s) or thing(s) that is neither the addressee nor the speaker.
Number:
Number refers to the grammatical distinction that is made based on the number of participants. In Spanish and English, two categories are recognized: Singular and plural. Singular refers to cases in which a single entity is being referenced; whereas, plural refers to cases in which more than one entity is being referred to.
Conjugation:
When a verb's root form is altered (inflected) to reflect various grammatical categories such as person, gender, number, tense, aspect, mood and voice, we call this conjugation. Take the following set of sentences, for example, which all use the verb "to be" in some of its various conjugated forms:
- Be quiet!
- I am quiet
- You were too quiet
- He is not very nice
- They are much nicer than he is.
- She was very friendly.
- Peace be with you.
In each of the examples above, the verb has been inflected to match certain grammatical criteria such as number, person, tense and mood. In order to convey the idea of grammatical person (i.e. to describe who is performing a particular action), English relies much more heavily on its subject pronouns than is true of Spanish. . Consequently, Spanish exhibits a much more robust system of verb conjugation.
Don't waste time in learning grammar at this time. Concentrate on how to understand the foreign language by translating from the foreign language to your native language.
