Beach Butter

Archive for June 4th, 2010

The future tense in Spanish is definitely one of the simplest of all tenses in Spanish to study as there are basically only a dozen consistantly used verbs considered irregular in conjugation.

The Spanish future tense is a rarity as far as tenses are concerned in Spanish for the reason that it is very regular in its conjugation. There are very few verbs that are deemed to be irregular Spanish verbs.

Even more surprising is that those verbs that are irregular, are not overly hard to learn as all of them follow a easily recognized pattern making Spanish verb conjugation much simpler…more about that shortly to start with however, I will first take a look at the conjugation of regular verbs in the tense known as the future.

The first big point is that each of the verb groups, the -er, -ir and -ar verb groups, have different endings in most of the other tenses in Spanish, in the future tense they all share exactly the same endings! These endings are attached to the infinitive of the verb being conjugated. For example:

Hablar - ‘to speak‘

• hablaré        I will speak
• hablarás      you will speak
• hablará        he, she or it will speak
• hablaremos we will speak
• hablaréis     you will speak (plural)
• hablarán      they will speak

As mentioned, this type of conjugation is applied to every Spanish verb in the future tense but there are also a small number of irregular verbs that are used frequently. As with the regular verbs the endings are exactly the same, however what makes these verbs irregular is that there are irregularities in the stem of each of them. Thankfully, these irregular stem changes are used throughout the conjugation, so even the irregular verbs are pretty regular!

The irregular verbs in the future tense, accompanied by the irregular stem change are:

• caber ‘to fit’ or ‘to be possible’ -              caber becomes cabr
• decir ‘to say’ -                                         decir becomes dir
• haber ‘to have’ -                                     haber becomes habr
• hacer ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ -                      hacer becomes har
• poder ‘to be able to’ or ‘can’ -                 poder becomes podre
• poner ‘to put’ -                                        poner becomes pondr
• querer ‘to want’ -                                     querer becomes querr
• saber ‘to know’ -                                     saber becomes sabr
• salir ‘to leave’ -                                       salir becomes saldr
• tener ‘to have’ -                                      tener becomes tendr
• valer ‘to cost’ -                                        valer becomes valdr
• venir ‘to come’ -                                      venir becomes vendr

Always remember that the irregular future tense verbs listed above are conjugated the same as for regular verbs and that the irregular stems are used instead of the full infinitive.