Top Spanish Verbs - Part 1

Learn the top spanish verbs

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Lesson Transcript

¡Hola! Hello. My name is Brenda Romaniello, and I’m your Spanish teacher for today.

In today’s lesson, we are going to learn the Top Verbs in Spanish for Daily Life. We’ll have a look at some vocabulary, then we’ll have a look at a dialogue, some examples, and then we’ll have a look at also the patterns of how we use these verbs in Spanish.

Let’s start with el vocabulario, “the vocabulary.”

Please repeat after me:

Let’s start with comer.

comer

comer [enunciated]

comer

beber

beber [enunciated]

beber

ver

Something that I really want you to notice here is that beber and ver, one is written with a “b” and another one is written with a “v,” but in Spanish, in terms of pronunciation, we don’t distinguish between “b” and “v.” It’s always a soft [b] - beber, ver.

¡Muy bien! Continuemos, let’s continue.

escuchar

escuchar [enunciated]

escuchar

comprar

comprar [enuncaited]

jugar

jugar [enunciated]

Let’s have a look at jugar here. So the first “j” that you can see there, is pronounced like an “h” in English, but a stronger “h” especially if you are in Spain. In Spain, it’s even stronger than when I’m saying it. I’m originally from Argentina, so my “j” is pretty, I would say, considered normal, not soft, not strong or hard. I’d say jugar, jugar, but in Spain, they say it stronger, yes. Something like jugar, jugar. Okay, muy bien.

Continuemos.

decir

decir [enunciated]

decir

Muy bien, very good. And remember, even though we have a “de-” here, we don’t say [decir], decir, decir.

leer

Here, you can see we have two (e)s. The first thing that I want you to notice here is that we’re not going to change, whenever we have two (e)s next to each other in a word in Spanish, we’re not gonna change it to [li], [lir], you know, right? Sometimes in English, we pronounce two (e)s as [i], right? In Spanish, that’s not gonna be the case. We also pronounce “e,” [e], as [e]. So in this case, we have two (e)s right here. Can you see that? Well, what we’re going to do is extend the pronunciation of that [e] and make it sound a little bit longer because we have two (e)s to pronounce here in this verb.

leer

Can you see that? I’m saying “le-” and then another “-er” - leer. Muy bien, very good!

Next one, escribir.

escribir

escribir [enunciated]

And the last one, hablar.

hablar

hablar [enunciated]

hablar

Something important to notice about hablar is that it starts with an “h,” but the “h” in Spanish is silent. We don’t pronounce it. So, for this verb, I want you to pretend that the “h” is not there. Pretend the “h” is not there and we simply say [ablar]. It’s not pronounced [hablar], okay. So, pretend it’s not there, the -h, simply say hablar.

Okay, so we have learned this vocabulary. We now know how to pronounce these verbs, so let’s have a look what they mean. Let’s have a look, and repeat after me so we practice pronunciation again.

So we have comer. It means “to eat.”

Beber means “drink.”

Ver, it means both, “to see,” yes, see and “watch” as well.

Escuchar “listen”

Ir “go”

Comprar, it means “buy.”

Jugar “play”

Decir “say”

Leer “read”

Escribir “write”

Hablar “talk”

Muy bien. Let’s move on now to a dialogue where we’re going to put these verbs into practice talking in a conversation. Let’s have a look at the question that we have here.

¿Qué haces?

¿Qué haces? “What are you doing?”

¿Qué haces?

Escucho música.

música

Escucho música. “I’m listening to music.”

¿Qué haces?

Escucho música.

Vamos a ver algunos ejemplos, let’s now look at some examples.

Leo un libro.

Leo un libro. “I’m reading a book.”

Juego videojuegos.

Juego videojuegos. “I’m playing videogames.”

So, these are a few examples of activities that you can do with the verbs that we have learned previously and they’re all word answering this question that we had a look in the dialogue section.

¿Qué haces?

Escucho música. “I’m listening to music.”

¿Qué haces? “What are you doing?”

Leo un libro. “I’m reading a book.”

¿Qué haces?

Juego videojuegos. “I’m playing videogames.”

I have a question for you now. Did you notice that in all these examples, escucho, lego, juego, the verb has changed from jugar, leer, and escuchar? Can you see that they are different? They look different and they all end in “o”? Okay, that is because, in this case, in the case of the verbs in the vocabulary section, these verbs are not what we call conjugated. That means there is no subject or person performing an action. So, these verbs are not…no one is performing these actions. These are just vocabulary for verbs. Just simply a list fo verbs.

So, in Spanish, we’re gonna have three different category of verbs. We have verbs that end in -r. For example, por ejemplo - escuchar, hablar, jugar. Can you see all these verbs are an example of the first category of verbs?

Then the second category of verbs are verbs ending in -er, yes.

Por ejemplo, for example - beber, comer, leer. All these verbs are an example of the second category of infinitive verbs.

And then the third category of infinitive verbs in Spanish are the verbs ending in -ir, yes, -IR.

por ejemplo, ir, decir. As you can see, all these verbs are an example of this third category of verbs. When we say category of verbs, we’re talking about verbs without conjugation in what we call the infinitive form, just the verb. And in English, the translation when we talk about the infinitive verbs, they will be what we say the verb with the “to” + [the infinitive], yes. For example, to read, to talk, to write, etc. To listen, etc.

So, going back to our examples. As you can see, when we note that the verbs end in “-o.” That is because in these cases, we have a person performing the action (a subject), which is in this case, yo, yes, “I,” yo, in this case is “I” who is performing these actions. So, whenever we have “I,” yo en en español, in Spanish, you’ll notice that the verb changes to that -o there.

Now, let’s talk about the pattern that we have for these structures using these verbs in Spanish. As you can see, the pattern is the [verb in the the first person] which is yo, you, yes, which means “I,” yo. And in this case, Leo, okay, Leo, yo, Leo, and I put it in between brackets here because it’s going to be optional to say “I” in Spanish. As we already have the person in the verb, in Spanish, repeating the person performing the action is ambiguous, but that’s another lesson. We don’t have to worry about that now. Just note that the pattern for these examples is [the verb in the first person], yes, and then an object.

So, let’s have a look at that.

Escucho música. “I’m listening to music.”

Leo un libro.

So, the first person, the verb in the first person is Leo and then the object is un libro “a book,” yes. So, in English, we would say I’m + [the verb] and [the object].

Leo un libro is “I’m reading a book.”

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