Conjugation of the presente de indicativo (simple present indicative)

includes a video lesson, an infographic free for download + interactive exercises

Verbs are the terms that express actions or conditions. In order to be able to speak and to be understood it’s necessary to know about the different tenses and how to conjugate them correctly.

Simple present indicative is one of the first tenses you learn when beginning with learning Spanish. This verb tense is used to discover the conjugations in Spanish.

What is conjugating?

Conjugating means changing a verb that is in the infinitive form so as to adapt it in regard to, e.g. time (present, past, etc.), person (I, you, etc.) and so on. The Spanish language has three conjugations.

This means that verbs are divided into three groups:

  1. Verbs in infinitive ending in “ar”: cantar
  2. Verbs in infinitive ending in “er”: comer
  3. Verbs in infinitive ending in “ir” :vivir

Since conjugations are something you have to learn right at the beginning when you start studying Spanish, the simple present is the tense we usually begin to work with.

✎ In order to conjugate regular verbs, you first need to find out whether the verb in its infinitive form ends in “-ar, -er or –ir”

  1. Alright, once this is done, you have to eliminate the endings “-ar, -er or –ir”: you can see in the infographic that -ar has been eliminated from the verb “cantar”. What is left is the root: cant-
  2. Next, you have to add the appropriate ending for each person and tense according to the corresponding column. Since in this case it’s a verb that ends in -ar, we add: -o, -as, -a, -amos, -áis, -an.
  3. And like that we conjugate all regular verbs in simple present.

Of course, this is only the case with regular verbs. The present tense has also irregular verbs that change their vowels in the root as well as verbs that are completely irregular and which you need to learn by heart. But we’ll look at that another day more in detail.

Below you’ll find an explanatory video plus a PDF containing an infographic about the conjugation for download as well as interactive exercises.

VIDEO LESSON

FREE INFOGRAPHIC: CONJUGATION OF THE PRESENTE SIMPLE DE INDICATIVO (SIMPLE PRESENT INDICATIVE)

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INTERAcTIVE exercises

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Featured image: dl Spanish lessons
Picture 01: dl Spanish lessons