Spanish Verbs

Spanish Verbs

The Verb "GO"

First, let's review what we know about verbs in general. They are made up of three parts. The first part, the "stem" tells us what action is taking place. The second part tells us which pattern the verb is going to follow. There are two of them, "A" verbs and "E" verbs, and they each have their own distinctive pattern. Finally, we have the third part of the verb, the ending which matches the subject (it tells us who is doing the action). This last part of the verb must match the subject of the verb. Let's quickly review this last part. Here are the endings which are used to make verbs match their subjects.

MATCH
O
S
--
MOS
N
Remember that the blank spaces in the third line mean "nothing", "zero", "zip", "nada". The vowel "a" or "e" which comes in the second space will in fact be the last letter of the verb form, although we remember that we are holding a place there which can have something in it at other times.

What then, are the forms of the verb "go" in Spanish. The first thing we need to do is to divide this verb just like any other one that we have studied, and in the process we will find out which are the forms in which irregularities occur.

We will begin with slot one (the "stem"). For the verb "go" this is just:

V

Notice that it is just one letter. That's all. We next need the know which category the verb "go" belongs to. In this case we use the "a". Now, I want to warn you, we are going to get into several irregularies with this verb. This is just the first one of several that we will have to deal with. Well, at this point, what we seem to have is:

STEM CATEGORY MATCH
V A
Notice that we have not placed anything in the third position yet. Remember, the third spot is the part of the verb which must match the subject. Let's start from the bottom up and see how this works.

If we want to say, "they are going" we would need to place an "n" in the last spot. For "we are going" there would need to be "mos" in the third position. In the case of "he is going" or "she is going" we would leave the third position blank. For "you are going" the third space would be filled with an "s". Now we get to the tricky part. You should be aware of the fact that many languages have irregular forms. These are forms which can not be predicted from the rules. They just have to be MEMORIZED. This happens in English. Let's take the case of the past tense in English. Normally we add "ed" to the end of a verb to make it past. This works with REGULAR verbs, such as "work" which becomes "worked". It does not work with "swim". You can't just add "ed" and get the past form. The correct past is "swam", and that has to be memorized. Almost every language has some irregular verb forms that must be learned this way. The good news is that in Spanish, there aren't a lot of them. There are about a dozen or so which you will need to memorize. When you think of the tremendous number of words that make up a language, that's not really very much. However, these words are used with such frequency, and in such a general context, that no matter what you are talking about, it is likely that you will need at least some of them. It is difficult to imagine a conversation in which these words, or some of them, do not occur. Getting back to the question of the for "I am going", we would expect to place an "o" in the final position, and then drop the "a" from the middle, as we did with the other verbs that we studied. In this case, that would give us "vo", which is not correct. The verb "go" in the form that matches for "I am going" is "voy". There are only four verbs in the language which do this. We can now construct a complete chart of the forms of the verb "go" in Spanish.

STEM CATEGORY SUBJECT MATCH
V ... OY
V A S
V A ...
V A MOS
V A N
We can now use these forms to tell where we are going. Notice that when we use the verb "go" in English, we nearly always follow the word with "to". In Spanish this is true also. The word for "to" in Spanish is "a". You will find that in Spanish, when you say "go", nearly always the next word is "a". There will be a few exceptions to this, which we can discuss later, but for now, keep in mind that after "go" you will next say "a" (which means 'to'). Let's see how this works.

How would you say, "we are going to the library"?

"Click" here for the answer.
How would you say, "I am going to the library"?

"Click" here for the answer.
How would you say, "John is going to the library"?

"Click" here for the answer.

I hope that this has helped you to learn the forms of "go" in Spanish. It is very important that you learn these forms well, because we will be using them a lot this year