One of the major difficulties that has the Spanish language learning for
English-speaking persons is to understand and learn the verbs and their
conjugations in different tenses.
The real difficulty, and we believe that the bigger one, in learning
Spanish by English-speakers, is the fact that each person singular and
plural, corresponds a different expression of the verb, and this also is
for all tenses.
This difficulty is caused by the following reasons:
- As with the vocabulary in Spanish in
general where, for the characteristic of Romance language, there are
many synonyms for nouns, adjectives and adverbs, the amount of verbs
with similar meanings is huge. In this regard, the practical and
simplified English language sense, besides the great use that makes the
language of “meaning by context”, facilitates learning of English for
Spanish speakers. - The amount of verbal conjugations in
Spanish is huge compared to the English, where the use of auxiliary
verbs and the rules of conjugation for different persons of the singular
and the plural, makes much less extensive amount of verbal expressions
to learn from the student.
As in English, in Spanish there is also the definition of regular and
irregular verbs. The difference between the two concepts is given in
that for English, regular verbs are those in which the variation of time
simple past and past participle with respect to the simple present,
only is given by the inclusion of the “ed” ending. In the case of
irregular verbs simple past and past participle differ markedly from the
simple present and there is not a definite rule that can be applied to
identify them.
Both the Spanish and the English, are languages rich in verbal tenses.
Especially if compared to languages like most Asians, where there are
only a few verbal forms (equivalent to the English and the Spanish
infinitive), and the time in which the action takes place is defined by
the adverbs of time associated with the occurrence.