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The verbs ser (to be) and ir (to go) both exhibit irregularities in the present, imperfect and preterite forms (note that these two verbs have the same preterite fui). Together with ver (to see) and prever (to foresee), they are the only four verbs with irregular imperfect indicative.
For other irregular verbs and their common patterns, see the article on Spanish irregular verbs. The tables include only the "simple" tenses (that is, those formed with a single word), and not the "compound" tenses (those formed with an auxiliary verb plus a non-finite form of the main verb), such as the progressive, perfect, and passive voice.
This is done in the following way: if the verb is an -er or -ir verb such as comer, poder, vivir, or compartir, replace the ending o with an a i.e. : Yo como; yo puedo; yo vivo → Yo coma; yo pueda; yo viva. If the verb is an -ar verb such as hablar or caminar replace the ending o with an e: i.e., Yo hablo; yo camino → Yo hable, yo camine.
The imperfect is used for both verbs since they refer to habits in the past. Either verb could optionally use the expression "used to" in English. Me bañaba = "I took baths" The preterite is used if this refers to a single action or event—that is, the person took a bath last night. Me bañé = "I took a bath"
The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
Voseo used on a billboard in El Salvador: ¡Pedí aquí tu fría! ("Order your cold one here!"). The tuteo equivalent would have been ¡Pide aquí tu fría! Voseo used on signage inside a shopping mall in Tegucigalpa, Honduras: En City sí encontrás de todo para lucir como te gusta ("At City you find everything to look how you like").
The preterite forms of some irregular verbs had multiple variants until the 17th century. Thus, the verb traer 'to bring' could be conjugated truxe, truxo 'I brought, he brought', alongside modern traxe, traxo (now spelled with j and not x ). [32] The variants truje, trujo are still found in some predominantly rural nonstandard varieties. [33]
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.