Spanish Verbs Made Simple(r) - Hillcrest Elementary

Those in the second group are “fundamentally” irregular not only because they
tend to have more than one irregularity, but also because of the nature of the past
tense irregularity itself: the pattern of accentuation is different and in most cases
there is a vowel change (e.g., infinitive poder S simple past pude).
The 17 fundamentally irregular verbs are:
ser/estar to be ir to go
haber/tener to have poder to be able (can)
andar to walk poner to put
caber to fit querer to want
dar to give saber to know
decir to say traer to bring, carry
hacer to do, make venir to come
-ducir (conducir, producir,
seducir, etc.)
Apart from caber and andar, all would likely appear on any list of the 25 most important
Spanish verbs. 5 It is also interesting to note that the majority correspond
to English irregular verbs.
We will use the nomenclature “perfectly regular”, “predictably regular”, “basically
regular”, and “fundamentally irregular”, in accordance with the above
schema.
Personal Pronouns
One of the major differences between the Spanish spoken in Spain and that
spoken in the Americas concerns the pronouns used for the second person
(“you”), and in some cases the verb forms used in the second person as well.
This will be considered in Chapter 8. Until that point we will consider only the
“standard” forms:
singular plural
1st person yo “I” nosotros/nosotras “we”
2nd person tú “you” vosotros/vosotras “you”
3rd person él /ella “he/she” ellos/ellas “they”
usted “you” ustedes “you”
INTRODUCTION 7
5 Caber owes its place on the list due to the close association, dating back to Latin, of its form with
that of saber. Andar is the sole survivor of a group of regular verbs which attempted to develop irregular
simple past tenses in Old Spanish times.