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Work Unit 27:¡Los muchachos de hoy son horribles! |
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Preterite Conjugation for Irregular Verbs
When you studied the conjugation of the preterite in the last lesson, you may have noticed that some of the verbs you use the most often weren't included. That's no accident, for the most commonly used verbs are most likely to be irregular, just as in English.
Assignment
Complete the lesson on pages 293-300. of the textbook.
Be sure to complete the exercises. Although copyright rules and fairness
to other students using this book prevent me from publishing all the answers,
you can check the answer page to see an answer
to the first question in each section to help get you started. If you have
any questions, feel free to ask them on the bulletin
board.
Background
You may have fears that there will be lots of memorizing to do as you learn irregular verbs. But that doesn't have to be the case. That's because most verbs that are irregular are irregular in a regular way, so to speak. Most of them have the same endings, and changes are in the stems. Thus, as the text indicates, traer ("to bring") and decir ("to say") follow the same pattern, as do estar ("to be") and tener ("to have").
The most unusual irregularily in the preterite tense is for the verbs ir ("to go") and ser ("to be"), as they share the same conjugation, a conjugation that doesn't appear to have anything to do with the verbs. Unless you had learned these two verbs, neither ser nor ir is likely to come to mind when you see words such as fui or fueron.
It might sound confusing to have two verbs that share the same conjugation, but in practice there is little difficulty. Take a sentence such as fui a la tienda, for example. It makes sense only to understand that sentence as "I went to the store"; "I was to the store" is nonsensical. Therefore, in that sentence fui is the preterite of ir. Similarly, la clase fue difícil can be undestood only as "the class was dfficult." To say "the class went difficult" is again nonensical, so the verb used here is ser.
Coming up
In the next lesson we will look at the Spanish equivalents for words such as "no one" and "none."
Next page > Sample Answers > Page 1, 2
