How Many Irregular Verbs There Are in Spanish and How to Use Them

Spanish is really great at not over-complicating things (as opposed to, say, English). 

With most Spanish verbs, for example, what you see is what you get. You apply the simple conjugation charts you already learned and—boom, you’re done.

However, some verbs (such as the irregular ones) are just weird and work under some unique rules.

Here, we’ve created a guide to teach you how to figure out these irregular verbs and their mysterious workings.

Contents

• How Many Irregular Verbs Are There in Spanish?
• An Introduction to Irregular Verb Conjugation
• How to Conjugate Irregular Verbs
• • Ser and Estar (To Be)
  • Haber (To Have)
  • Hacer (To Do) and Decir (To Say)
  • Tener (To Have) and Poner (To Put)
  • Sentir (To Feel) and Seguir (To Follow)

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How Many Irregular Verbs Are There in Spanish?

Spanish has over 250 irregular verbs. While this may sound like a lot, don’t worry, there are lots of patterns that will help you memorize a majority of these irregular verbs.

These numbers should put things into perspective when thinking about how many Spanish verbs are irregular:

• Almost all -AR verbs are regular. Less than 5% are irregular.
• Almost all -ER verbs are irregular. Over 72% are irregular. There are 18 verbs that end in -AER and they are all irregular. For example, caer (to fall) and traer (to bring).
• Less than half of all -IR verbs are irregular. Over 33% are irregular.

An Introduction to Irregular Verb Conjugation

Irregular verbs are verbs that do not use the standard, “regular” verb conjugations that you probably know.

What makes irregular verbs difficult is that they do not have a regular set of rules you can follow, however, there are some tips and tricks that will help you understand irregular verb conjugation.

How to Conjugate Irregular Verbs

Let’s look at some common irregular Spanish verbs and how you use them.

Ser and Estar (To Be)

These are the two most common verbs in Spanish. They’re also two of the weirdest verbs to conjugate. 

I’m not going to go into all of the differences between ser and estar, but I am going to show you how to conjugate these funky verbs in the five indicative simple tenses.

Estar in every tense starts with “est.” So even though the endings are irregular, which will take a bit of practice and memorization, the beginning three letters are always the same.

This will also help you distinguish between ser and estar in reading and conversation.

Haber (To Have)

Haber is another verb that doesn’t quite have anything else like it.

Only a few of these conjugations are irregular and are shown in red below.

You can see that the real funky tense is the preterite. The only thing that’s different is that, in the preterite, you’re using a u when normally you would use an a.

Hacer (To Do) and Decir (To Say)

Decir and hacer have one main thing in common: the soft c. This means that they have similar irregularities:

1. The first person conjugation (yo) in the present tense requires a g for both decir and hacer.

2. In the preterite tense, they both change the vowel in their stems to i.

3. The conditional tense for hacer and decir both add an r.

Take a look!

Tener (To Have) and Poner (To Put)

This pair also have different meanings, but share some irregularities:

1. In the first person conjugation (yo) of the present tense there’s a g.

2. The preterite tense changes the stem vowel to u for both poner and tener.

3. In the conditional and the future tenses there’s a d placed before the conjugated ending.

Sentir (To Feel) and Seguir (To Follow)

These two verbs have the same irregularity in preterite: The e changes to i in both the singular and the plural third person conjugations.

However, they have different irregularities in the present tense:

• Sentir has ie instead of e in the singular first and second person conjugations. 
• Seguir has just an i instead of the e for the first person plural and the first, second and third person singular.

These irregularities are very common and you will find them repeated often.

Other verbs which have the same irregularity as sentir (e to ie) include: empezar, comenzar, pensar and querer.

Other verbs like seguir (e to i) are: pedir, elegir and medir.

The best way to pick up on these irregular verbs is to see, read or hear them in natural contexts.

This can be done easily by consuming authentic Spanish media, like books or TV shows, or by using immersion-based language learning programs.

One example is FluentU, which uses Spanish videos featuring native speakers and interactive subtitles. For any spoken word, verb or otherwise, these captions provide definitions, grammatical details and example sentences.

With time you’ll be able to hear the differences in regular and irregular verbs and be able to use them as they’re meant to be used!