The Infinitive and Conjugating Verbs

The infinitive is what we call a verb in it's simplest form. If you look up a verb in the dictionary you look up the infinitive form of that verb.

The infinitive has two parts - The stem and the ending.
In Spanish the endings of verbs are always either -ar, -er, or -ir.

So, for example, if you see the word Hablar, you can see that it ends with an -ar, so it's a verb.

Lets look it up.


Hablar means "to speak".

(you can see in this picture that there's much more information in the dictionary too. I'm going to write a post on how to use the dictionary soon, so that you can find the right information when you look up words. If it sounds silly to learn how to use a dictionary then just go and look up the word "face" in a Spanish/English dictionary, and come back and tell me which of those words you think you'll use!)


The Stem is habl and the ending is ar

The infinitive form of a verb, like hablar, is a little bit like a form where only one part has been filled in

Conjugating a verb is like adding the rest of the information to the form.

One conjugation of hablar is hablamos:

You can see that the stem stayed the same (habl) but the ending changed from -ar to -amos, and you can also see that now the whole form is filled out! That little ending, -amos, packs a punch. It tells us who is doing the verb, and when it is happening. Hablamos means: "We speak". 

Hablamos el Español. 

Hablamos el Ingles.

We're not going to look at all the endings right here. In the next post I'm going to cover Regular Verbs, like hablar, and the endings we put on them in the present tense. 

So, to recap, those are two main reasons to know your infinitives:

1. You need to know the infinitive of a verb if you want to look it up in the dictionary. 
2. You need to know the infinitive of a verb if you're going to conjugate it (and talk about how you used to swim every day, or say you will do you're homework later). 

And there are also some times when you can use the infinitive without conjugating it, usually with a verb that is conjugated.

For example:    


Quiero hablar contigo.
I want "to speak" with you

Quiero is conjugated and means "I want", so you don't need to conjugate hablar because we already have information about who and when.





Here are some puzzles and exercises to help you remember all of that!

Spot the verb
Verbsearch 1 Verbsearch 2
Separate the verbs into -ar, -er, and -ir verbs
Spot the infinitive
Crossverb


Coming soon:
Find the Stem
Verb information forms