A definitive guide to tener conjugations in all 16 tenses & moods (2023)

FAQs

What are all the conjugations of tener? ›

The three main tenses you should learn first in Spanish are the present (el presente), the past (also called the preterite, el pretérito), and the future (el futuro). They're the ones you'll run into most. You can get a lot of things across from these tenses and still be understood in the beginning.

1. Subjunctive. This might be one of the hardest things to get. After being bombarded with tens of new tenses (in the indicative), you learn there's a whole other dimension of tenses called the subjuntivo.

Often people think that they need to learn Latin before Spanish, since Latin is the ancestor of Spanish. Honestly, it doesn't matter either way. Latin and Spanish are two different languages, as I emphasized up above. They do, however, have a lot of shared vocabulary roots and grammatical forms.

However, Spanish has more verb tenses/moods and conjugations than French, which you have to memorize and know how to use properly to be understood. From this perspective, it's easier to become conversationally fluent in French.

The conditional is one of the easiest tenses to conjugate as it keeps the verb in its infinitive form and only adds an inflection at the end of it, for the three types of regular verbs (-ar, -er, -ir).

Vosotros is used when an individual person or speaker is addressing a group of 2 or more people. Vosotros in English stands for “you” as the plural “you and others.”

There are three types of Spanish regular verbs. You'll easily recognize them by theirs endings: -ar, -er or –ir.

In Spanish, you conjugate verbs by changing the ending. If the subject is I (yo), conjugate by dropping the ending and add -o. If the subject is you – informal (tú), conjugate by dropping the ending and add -as (for -ar verbs) or -es (for -er and -ir verbs).

What are 5 sentences using tener? ›

Tener is an irregular verb, which means that its conjugations don't follow a common pattern. Since we use this verb a lot in Spanish, it's a good idea to practice the present tense conjugations so you can use them quickly. You can create sentences by starting with the subject and then using the matching verb form.

Tener (pronounced teh-nehr, with a soft 'r' at the end) means 'to have'. In its most basic form, it is used to express possession and necessity. At other times, it is used commonly in phrasing in which you'd normally use the verb 'to be~.

Tener is the Spanish verb "to have". It is an extremely useful verb and is largely irregular when conjugating. It is important to note that in Spanish, tener is used to portray a person's age; for example: "tengo 21 años". This literally translates to "I have 21 years".

Spanish pronunciation is easier to the English native speaker, while the French accent can be difficult to master. The French language has sounds that are unfamiliar to a native English speaker. Inability to roll the tongue can make speaking Spanish a challenge.

Spanish has 25 phonemes; it's generally agreed that English has 44 phonemes. (Phonemes are speech sounds.) So it's generally harder for a Spanish speaker to pronounce English well. It means learning entirely new sounds.

Although it may come as a surprise, English and Spanish are not so different, since both belong to the Indo-European language family, they are more similar than they may seem at first glance. The richness of the Spanish language is immense and for this very reason, the language can be difficult to learn.

Tied with Mexico for the purest Spanish in Latin America, Colombia is an obvious choice for the best Spanish speaking country for language study. Plus, it's home to Shakira and her hips don't lie.

Latin essentially “died out” with the fall of the Roman Empire, but in reality, it transformed — first into a simplified version of itself called Vulgar Latin, and then gradually into the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Thus, Classical Latin fell out of use.

What age is best to learn Spanish? ›

It concluded that starting to learn a new language before age 10 will give a learner the best chance of achieving proficiency similar to that of a native speaker. Why before 10 years old? Because children's brains are adept at learning the grammatical rules and pronunciation of new languages.

To sum up, while Italian is easier in terms of pronunciation, Spanish is simpler in terms of grammar. It seems this Italian vs Spanish thing is not as easy as we thought it would be. If you speak English, Spanish will be definitively easier than Italian for you because there are more similarities.

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

Overall, Spanish might be easier than German at the beginning stages, but the two tend to even out in difficulty once learners get to the more advanced stages. German has more complicated grammar rules that need to be mastered early on, but once learners get familiar with them, they find that they're pretty consistent.

There are four past tenses in Spanish; the perfecto, the indefinido, the imperfecto and the pluscuamperfecto. These four tenses dance together when we tell stories about the past or anecdotes… The four are necessary to express when the action happens, but also to set up the context of that past story.

“Assume that a language learner is aiming for 90% coverage in each of the four parts of speech that represent open classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This 90% figure will be obtained by knowing about 2600 nouns, 230 verbs, 980 adjectives, and 50 adverbs, or a total of about 3800 total forms.” ]

Is Spanish Grammar Easy? Many people choose to learn Spanish over other languages because they've heard that Spanish grammar is relatively easy to learn. While it's true that Spanish grammar rules aren't necessarily hard, they do take patience and practice to master, just like with any new skill.

Ser and Estar

One of the hardest Spanish grammar concepts to grasp for learners of the language is the use of the verbs ser and estar. Both verbs translate as “to be” and native English speakers find it really hard to know when to use which.

Do they say ustedes in Spain? ›

In Spain, usted (singular) and ustedes (plural) are used as well. But this happens only for more formal occasions, or occasions where respect must be shown. So, if you meet the Pope while in Spain, be sure to use the usted form. In other Spanish-speaking countries, however, vosotros is never (or rarely) used.

nosotros = we (masc.) nosotros = we (fem.) tú = you (informal) vosotros = you (masc., inf.) vosotras = you (fem., inf.)

The verbs ser (to be), ir (to go), and ver (to see) are completely irregular in the imperfect tense.

How many irregular verbs are there in Spanish? There are more than 250 irregular verbs in Spanish, but they vary in the intensity of their irregularity.

In English, we can break the tenses down to five main areas: past, present, future, perfect and conditional.

All English verbs (except to be) have five forms: base, past tense, past participle, present participle, and third-person singular.

Is conjugation in Spanish hard? ›

Some of the most commonly used verbs also happen to be irregular verbs in Spanish. That's what makes verb conjugation seem so difficult. But there are patterns with irregular verbs, too, and you'll have lots of practice with these verbs to get used to the conjugation. So don't get discouraged!

171. Verbs are classed in Four Regular Conjugations, distinguished by the stem vowel which appears before -re in the Present Infinitive Active.

The modern Spanish verb paradigm (conjugation) has 16 distinct complete forms (tenses), i.e. sets of forms for each combination of tense, mood and aspect, plus one incomplete tense (the imperative), as well as three non-temporal forms (the infinitive, gerund, and past participle).

Many languages require the conjugation of verbs if they follow a pronoun. An effective way to study and learn these different conjugations is to use two stacks of flashcards simultaneously. One stack will consist of verbs, and the other stack will be the pronouns.

While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.

A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”.

How Many Tenses are There in Japanese? Japanese has only two verb tenses, which are the present tense and the past tense. The present tense is also used to express things about the future in Japanese, so there's no clear distinction between the present tense and the future tense.

Traditional English Grammar includes 12 tenses. This number is supported by many linguists of specialized web sites.

What is Tener used for? ›

Tener (pronounced teh-nehr, with a soft 'r' at the end) means 'to have'. In its most basic form, it is used to express possession and necessity. At other times, it is used commonly in phrasing in which you'd normally use the verb 'to be~.

The imperfect root of Tener is tenía. The imperfect tense is rarely irregular and can be easily conjugated from this form, which is the yo, and él/ella conjugation.