GCSE Spanish: Verb Forms

Knowing which tense a sentence needs is one skill; being able to write the form down without an error is another, and it is the one that quietly costs marks. This practice is about the second. You build the yo form of a verb whose stem changes, decide where a reflexive pronoun goes when the verb is conjugated and where it goes when there is an infinitive, tell a friend to do something and then tell the same friend not to do it — two different forms, which is the trap — and finish with the perfect tense, an irregular past participle, and the conditional. Several questions name the person being addressed or the English meaning, because without that more than one option would be perfectly good Spanish, and a question with two right answers teaches nothing. Every explanation says what each wrong option actually is: a real form of a different verb, the right form for the wrong person, or a tense that moves the sentence in time. Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Form the present tense of verbs whose stem changes o to ue, e to ie and e to i, and know which persons the change skips
• Place a reflexive pronoun before a conjugated verb and attach it to an infinitive, matching the pronoun to the subject
• Form an affirmative tú command from the third-person present, and a negative one from the subjunctive
• Tell a tú command apart from an usted command and from the ordinary present tense
• Build the perfect tense with haber plus the past participle, including irregular participles such as dicho
• Recognise the conditional and distinguish it from the future, the imperfect and the imperfect subjunctive

You are telling a friend not to do something. ¡No ______ tan tarde! — llegues. A negative command to someone you call tú uses the present subjunctive, so the affirmative and the negative are built differently: it is llega, but no llegues.