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VerbsIn Spanish, all verbs are conjugated against a noun: almost always this is the active person in thesentence (and in fact, that is usually the subject as well), but occasionally it is the phrasal object instead.This means that you can't just look up a verb if you want to say it, even in a basic sentence such as Iwalk. First, you need to conjugate it. Nearly all Spanish verbs have one of three endings: -ar, -er, and -ir.

How to approach the conjugations? Most verbs with the same ending conjugate the same way, and arecalled regular verbs. Perhaps because of all the exceptions with irregular verbs, we tend to utilize wholetables of conjugation, displaying all the possible combinations (or at least all the relevant ones). And thatlends itself to presenting even the regular verbs with these large tables of combinations. It wouldn't bethat bad, except, there are dozens of conjugations per verb. You can see that each verb ending hasalmost the same conjugation, only a little different. This leaves 11 words per tense, but it can besimplified further:

usted, l, and ella usually share the same conjugation.ustedes and ellos share the same conjugation.The Spaniard's vosotros and the Porteo second person singular vos are usually the same,

except the "i" is dropped in double-vowel endings. More to the point, neither is necessary, since they areboth localizations.And thus, there are 5 endings for each verb form; only 5 to memorize! Thus, for the present simple:

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That ending set under the top cel "all", is very important to memorize. That's the foundation from whichall further conjugations are made. Generally all conjugations, across all tenses, are permutations of thissmall set of conjugations. But some are easier than that:

Gerunds are an easier form to conjugate, although unlike in English they rarely can be used bare in asentence, requiring an appropriately conjugated "ester" first.

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Therefore, estoy escribiendo ahora (I am writing now), which diversifies the wealth of present tensesentences you can make, or at least it is much better than being stuck saying I write.

Likewise, imperatives are very easy. (I like to think that you get infinitives for free, just by memorizing thebase present tense conjugations.) You never give an imperative to yourself, nor to third persons! And interms of the affixed ending to the suffixes, it turns out that they are mirror images of eachother. Theresulting tables are like this:

If you think about it the right way, this is really just a couple facts to memorize: -ar verbs end in "a", the

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others in "e", when addressing the second person singular. (I think that's a reasonable default person toaddress for an imperative.) For everyone else, or when addressing that person formally, it reverses, andthe root ending is applied. The root endings for the imperative are always the same as the present tense,(except t, which has no "s").