The Spanish and English languages have a lot in common, with some words so similar it’s possible to guess their meaning. But building sentences and using the correct verb tenses is a different matter altogether. While expressing our frustrations on the subject, one of our Spanish friends once told us “if you want to speak Spanish, you have to learn the verbs”. And from what we can see from years of language struggles, she was right.
Spanish verbs and how they change depending on who you are talking to, whether things happened in the past, are happening in the present or will happen in the future can be challenging to get to grips with.
However, we found a website focusing on Spanish verbs to help you with this struggle. Created by a now retired Spanish language professor, Fred F. Jehle at Purdue University, Fort Wayne, Indiana (USA), this website is dedicated to verbs.
On his site, you will find pages dedicated to how Spanish verbs change, and write-ups up of their “shapes”, tenses and forms. Moreover, it includes answers to common questions relating to learning Spanish, including some basic grammar, use of accents, which syllables to stress when pronouncing various words, letters particular to the Spanish alphabet and more.
On professor Jehle’s website, you will find several hundred of the most common (and some less commonly used) verbs in the Spanish language. When you click on a verb, you open a page showing you the root of the verb, what it means in English and how the verb changes depending on time and person involved.
Lucky for us, the university did not remove the site following Fred’s retirement. You can find the website here: Spanish verbs.
For those of us used to Google translate, and/or dictionaries (whether online or in book-form), this site feels far more in-depth, yet it is still simple to understand and easy to navigate. Though it does not give you the option of testing your knowledge and understanding interactively in sample sentences like Duolingo, provide a video containing examples of their uses in everyday situations or let you interact with an actual teacher.
We all learn in different ways, but if studying verbs (while adding in a grammatical refresher) is your way of absorbing new knowledge, this certainly is a website for you.
The site also provides a blank verb form chart that you can print and fill out by hand to test your skills.
(As a side note, the site does feel like something of a “blast from the past” with regards to information and practical advice concerning the use of word processing in combination with DOS, Windows 95/98 and ASCII numerical values, all the way up to Windows XP).
In short, this might well be a useful Spanish language website to check out as part of your learning process. We wish you good luck with your Spanish language studies!
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