BASIC SPANISH: A GRAMMAR AND WORKBOOK

UNIT THREE

Unit 3 Subject pronouns and present tense of regular verbs

verbs

Verbs in Spanish change their endings to indicate the subject – i.e. the person who is
doing the action. This means that it is not always necessary to use subject pronouns – ‘I’,
‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, etc. However, one significant difference between Spanish and English
that needs to be understood before we can look in more detail at verbs is the various ways
of saying ‘you’.

How to say ‘you’ in Spanish

Deciding how to address someone is more complicated in Spanish than in English. There
are singular and plural forms depending on how many people you are talking to and there
are also different forms depending on how formal or familiar you want to be, so in total
there are four possibilities for translating the word ‘you’ in standard Spanish:

• When you are speaking to someone you know well, such as family or friends, you
  would use the familiar form, and when you are talking to a stranger or to someone
  with whom you want to maintain a certain level of formality, you would use the
  formal one.


• When you are using the familiar form of address, the word for ‘you’ when addressing
  one person is tú and if you are addressing more than one person you must use
  vosotros or vosotras.


• Vosotros is the used when addressing two or more people who are all masculine or
  when addressing two or more people when some are masculine and some are
  feminine.


• Vosotras is used when addressing two or more people who are all feminine.

For example, if you were talking to your parents, you would use vosotros, as one is
masculine and one is feminine, but if you were talking to your sisters, you would use
vosotras.
Since verb endings in Spanish are distinctive and unambiguous, the use of the
pronouns tú and vosotros is not common.
When you are talking to a stranger or to someone with whom you wish to be more
formal, you must use usted, and when addressing two or more people, ustedes.
Usted is used with the same verb ending as ‘he’ and ‘she’, while ustedes is used with
the same verb ending as ‘they’, so in order to avoid any ambiguity, it is sometimes
necessary to include these with the verb.
Usted is usually abbreviated in writing to Vd./Ud. and ustedes to Vds./Uds.