The Spanish Present Subjunctive is one of the most complicated mood for Spanish students. Here at our Spanish school, we recomend you follow our video series about the Spanish Subjunctive, so that you can learn/review it’s content ouside of class.
Regular Present Subjunctive
In this part we are going to talk about the formation of the Regular Present Subjunctive. Its formation isn’t very complicated as you can see if you follow the lesson step by step.
First:
We can think about the conjugation of the Present Inddicative. It’s a conjugation with which you are already familiar and surely have no problema with. Here is a reminder of the conjugation of the Present Indicative of regular verbs like cantar, comer and vivir.
Second:
We will make a change to the vowels. With the –AR verbs, we substitute the a with an e. With the –ER and –IR verbs, we substitue the e with an a. You can see in the continuation how the verb transforms after apllying the change to the vowels. That way we obtain the Present Subjunctive of the regular verbs, without any other mystery.
Examples:
Lisa prefiere que tus amigos no canten – Lisa prefers that your friends don’t sing
Yo quiero que tú cantes mi canción favorita – I want you to sing my favorite song
La abuela quiere que el niño coma todo el plato – The grandmother wants the kids to eat their meal
Ella no quiere que tú comas su pastel – She doesn’t want you to eat her cake
Marisa prefiere que su hijo viva en su ciudad – Marisa prefers that her son lives in her city
Vosotros preferís que vuestros vivan cerca – You all prefer to live close
Of course –as it’s not uncomon in Spanish- there also exists irregular verbs in the Present Subjunctive but we will talk about them in the following videos of the series about the Spanish Subjunctive.
To review the formation of the Regular Present Subjunctive you can watch the following video as many times as needed:
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