VERBS

Verbs rule the grammar world.  That is not to say that the other forms of speech are not important.  However, you can learn as many nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions as you want, but unless you learn the verbs and how to conjugate them you are going to have very limited conversations.

And if you just limit yourself to learning the present forms of the verbs, then once again you have severely limited the conversations you can have in Spanish.   For example if you know how to say the words "I" "basketball" and "play", you can form the sentence "I play basketball."  But what if you wanted to answer the question "What did you do today?"  You could not, at least in English, say "I play basketball". Yet if you did not know the past tense of "play" was "played", then you could not answer the question.  But because you did not the past tense of "play" is "played" then you were able to answer the question.  Keeping the same nouns "I" and "basketball" you were able to convey a new thought by just changing the verb tense.  That is why verbs rule.

There are two main problems with learning verbs in Spanish.  One is that you have to learn verb endings.  In English you can say "I played", "She played", "We played", "They played".  This is not the same in Spanish.  To express each of the above in Spanish you would have to change the verb ending.  In this case you would say "jugué", "jugaste", "jugamos" and "jugasteis".  Now this seems to be very complicated, but with a few exceptions, once you learn the appropriate endings you will be all set.

The other problem is that you might not have been paying attention in during your English grammar class.  Why is English grammar important to learning a foreign language?  Well the actual grammar might not be of use unless you happen to be studying a language that had the same exact grammar as does English, however what is important to know is the parts of speech.

If I said to you what is the past tense of "I play", you would answer "I played".  The only thing is that usually grammar books (English or foreign) do not refer to that as the past tense of the verb, but rather the "preterite" tense.  And the preterite tense really only expresses an action that has happened during a fixed time in the past and has stopped.  There is another past tense called the "imperfect" tense.  This is an action that may have gone on during an unfixed period of time.  "Yesterday I played basketball" would be an example of a "preterite" tense sentence.  "John worked on Saturdays" would be an example of an "imperfect" tense sentence.  (We will discuss these differences in more detail later).

The thing is that you probably using these words correctly in English without even knowing that you are forming, for example, the preterite form of a verb.   And the reason is because you are hearing English all of the time and also we have fewer verb endings.  In order to learn Spanish (as with any language that conjugates verbs), you will need to learn or re-learn some of the parts of speech.  So part of our lesson will be on the parts of speech.