Spanish Core Verbs flashcards
This deck covers twenty-four of the highest-frequency verbs in Spanish, each with its English meaning and the one conjugation fact that most often trips learners up — an irregular yo form (tengo, hago, pongo, salgo), a stem change (poder, querer, volver, pedir), an irregular preterite stem (supe, quise, vine, puse), or a spelling change before certain endings (llegué, empecé).
A small number of verbs carry a huge share of ordinary Spanish: ser, estar, haber, tener, hacer, poder, decir and ir alone appear in almost any paragraph you read. They are also the most irregular verbs in the language, so learning them properly early pays off in every tense you meet afterward. Class quizzes, AP Spanish, and placement tests all test them directly, and the ser/estar and saber/conocer distinctions are among the most commonly missed points on any Spanish exam.
The deck
How to study this deck
- Store each verb with its yo form, not just its infinitive. The yo form is where most Spanish irregularity lives (tengo, hago, salgo, pongo, conozco, sé), and it is the form the present subjunctive is built from.
- Group the stem-changing verbs by pattern — e to ie (querer, empezar, venir), o to ue (poder, volver), e to i (pedir) — and remember the change never touches the nosotros or vosotros forms, which is exactly what makes the boot shape.
- Drill ser versus estar and saber versus conocer as sentence pairs rather than as definitions: write one sentence where each is correct and say why, since exams test the choice in context and not the translation.