One way of thinking of the conditional tense is that it's the equivalent of English verb forms that use "would," as in saying "no comería una hamburguesa" for "I wouldn't eat a hamburger." That's usually a good rule to follow. But as explained in our recently updated lesson on using the conditional tense, there are many times where "would" doesn't translate to the conditional, and where the conditional isn't best translated by "would."
Related Articles
- Restore Passion to Your Relationship - Get the Passion Back in Your Relatio...
- The Aviator Movie - Leonardo DiCaprio Interview on The Aviator
- Individuals Who Stop Exercising Lose Long-Term Mood-Enhancing Benefits
- English Tenses - Verb Tenses Resources
- Miscellaneous Uses of the Spanish Conditional Tense — Spanish Grammar
Explore Spanish Language
Must Reads
Most Popular
By Category
- Learn Spanish Grammar
- Spanish Pronunciation
- Written Spanish
- Spanish Language Schools
- Spanish-Language Culture
- Spanish Vocabulary
- In the News
- Spanish-Language Literature
- Entertainment in Spanish
- History of Spanish
- Spanish-Language Products
- Translation Resources
- Spanish for Travelers
- Tips for Learning Spanish
- Teaching Resources
©2012 About.com. All rights reserved.
A part of The New York Times Company.
Comments
Not to be picky, but I wouldn’t really call the conditional a “tense,” just like most people don’t do so with the subjunctive; it’s actually a mood that expresses certain types of states of affairs (contingent, hypothetical, etc. modalities).
“Tense” in a linguistic sense refers only to time and “mood” to modality–that’s why the conditional doesn’t inherently situate anything with time, since it’s only a mood.
Or at least that’s what I would say as a linguist; I’m not sure what most Spanish-as-a-second-language teachers do with their students. Of course, most of them would end up just calling everything “tense” anyway, so it might not matter.