Conjugation I
Introduction
I run. He runs. She skips. You skip. In English, we conjugate verbs unthinkingly. As native speakers, it is easy for us to almost ignore one of the most challenging aspects of learning any foreign language: the verb conjugation system.
What is conjugation?
Conjugation is the process of making a verb match its subject. You may have studied subject-verb agreement in English. That is conjugation: making sure that the verb corresponds to its subject. For instance, you would never say "I runs," but you say "He runs" without a second thought. That is because the verb "to run" has been conjugated to fit the subject "he" by dropping the infinitive "to" and adding an ending (in this case, -s) to the end of the verb.
Conjugation in Spanish
In Spanish, conjugation is the same as in English: get rid of the infinitive part of a verb and add an ending that matches the subject of the verb. Also like in English, the conjugations are grouped by subject pronoun ("he," "she," and "it" have the same conjugations in English: He runs, she runs, it runs). That is why the chart of subject pronouns has such weird groups on it: those are the pronouns that have the same conjugations.
Next topics:
Conjugation is the process of making a verb match its subject. We group conjugations by subject pronoun since the subject of the verb determines the correct conjugation.