Since living a half year in Spain in 1995 I’ve been interested in verbs and verb conjugation. The reason is that the Spanish language has quite a lot of irregular verbs that the student just needs to learn, in order to properly communicate.
I learnt quite quickly the most used Spanish verbs that are all irregular; ser ’to be’, estar ’to be’, ir ’to go’, tener ’to have’, haber ’to have’, poner ’to put’, etc.
But the more I learnt the more new irregular verbs. So I bought my first verb conjugation book ”Al arte de conjugar verbos en español”. This book simply contains 100+ sample verbs, each representing a group of irregular verbs. In the end of this book there’s an index with 12,000 verbs that refer to a sample verb.
This kind of verb conjugation book helps the student to find the correct conjugation for any verb. I say any verb, because a verb not being in the book is typically a new verb ‘neologism’ and these tend to be conjugated regularly.
Bookstores seem to have even 10s of verb conjugation books alone for the Spanish language. I assume this is due to Spanish being a popular language to study.
So did I learn to speak Spanish by read a verb conjugation book? No I learnt it when hitch-hiking around the Iberian Peninsula in spring 1995. But in the written Spanish the book served me for a long time as the ultimate help.
Links:
- Verb conjugation briefly explained: http://www.verbconjugation.info/
- On-line verb conjugator: http://www.verbix.com/languages/spanish.shtml