Spanish verb tenses, explained simply

How many there are, what each one is for, and the 16 nemiria teaches

How many tenses does Spanish have?

There is no one number, and anybody who gives you one without explaining it is simplifying. Here is the honest version.

The grammarians' answer is 16 forms. The Real Academia's own reference grammar lays out the paradigm as five simple and five compound tenses in the indicative, and three simple and three compound in the subjunctive:

Mood	Simple	Compound
Indicative	canto · canté · cantaba · cantaré · cantaría	he cantado · hube cantado · había cantado · habré cantado · habría cantado
Subjunctive	cante · cantara (or cantase) · cantare	haya cantado · hubiera cantado · hubiere cantado

Many books say 14 instead, and they are not wrong either. They drop the two future subjunctive forms, cantare and hubiere cantado, because the Academy itself describes that tense as an archaic feature surviving today in legal and administrative texts, along with a few proverbs and set phrases. A third form on that list, the pretérito anterior (hube cantado), is barely more alive: the Academy's own glossary says its use is restricted to written language, and most often literary writing. So if you learn "16" from one book and "14" from another, nobody has made a mistake.

And both lists leave out things you will need in week one. Estoy hablando (I am talking) and voy a hablar (I am going to talk) are not tenses in the grammarians' sense. They are perífrasis verbales, verb constructions built from a helper verb plus a gerund or an infinitive, and the Academy treats them separately from the tense paradigm. That is a perfectly sound way to classify them. It is also no help at all to somebody trying to say "I'm working" out loud.

How nemiria's 16 are organised

So nemiria teaches its own 16, chosen for what a learner has to produce rather than for how the paradigm is drawn up. It is a different 16 from the one above, in two specific ways:

• It includes four constructions the grammars class as periphrases: the three progressives (estoy / estaba / estaré hablando) and the two going-to forms (voy a hablar, iba a hablar), because they are everywhere in real speech.
• It leaves out three forms you are unlikely to produce: the pretérito anterior and both future subjunctives, for the reasons above.

That is the whole of the difference, and it is worth knowing so that the numbers on the app and in your grammar book stop looking like a contradiction.

A tense answers two questions at once: when something happens, and how it happens, whether it is a finished event, an ongoing one, or one that was already complete before something else.

Fourteen of nemiria's 16 sort themselves by time. Three sit in the present, four point at the future, and seven describe the past, which is where Spanish asks more of you than English and where most of the real work is. The last two are the subjunctive, and they are not about time at all. More on that below.

Two things are worth noticing on that map before you learn a single ending.

First, the past is crowded. English gets by with far fewer past forms, so a large part of learning Spanish is learning to choose between past tenses that all translate into the same English words. The famous one is Preterite against Imperfect, which has a guide of its own.

Second, several tenses are the same simple idea moved along the timeline. Estar plus an -ando or -iendo form gives you "in progress", and moving estar itself into the present, past or future gives you the Present Progressive, the Past Progressive and the Future Progressive. Haber plus a past participle gives you "already complete", and moving haber along gives you the Present Perfect, the Pluperfect, the Future Perfect and the Conditional Perfect. That is seven of the 16 covered by two patterns.

The present tenses

All the examples below use the same verb, hablar (to speak), so you can see the shape change rather than the vocabulary.

Tense	Used for	Example
Present Simple	Habits, routines and general facts. Watch for siempre, todos los días, normalmente.	Hablas español muy bien.You speak Spanish very well.
Present Progressive	What is happening right now. In English it always ends in -ing.	Estoy hablando con mi madre por teléfono.I am talking to my mother on the phone.
Present Perfect	Past actions with present relevance. In English, have or has plus a past participle.	He hablado con ella esta mañana.I have spoken to her this morning.

The Present Simple is the one to own first. It is the base that several other tenses are built from, including the Present Subjunctive, and it is what you speak in most of the time.

One regional note worth knowing early: for things finished earlier today, Spain reaches for the Present Perfect (he hablado con ella esta mañana) where much of Latin America would use the Preterite (hablé con ella esta mañana). Neither is wrong. They are two accents of the same language, which is why it is worth deciding early which one you are learning.

The future tenses

Tense	Used for	Example
Am Going To	Decided plans and near-future intentions. The decision is already made.	Voy a hablar con ella mañana.I am going to talk to her tomorrow.
Future Simple	Predictions and plans. Watch for mañana, el lunes, el año que viene.	Hablaré con ella mañana por la mañana.I will speak to her tomorrow morning.
Future Progressive	Something that will be in progress at a particular future moment.	A las ocho estaré hablando con el cliente.At eight I will be speaking with the client.
Future Perfect	Something finished before a future point. Watch for para plus a time word.	Para el lunes habré hablado con todos los clientes.By Monday I will have spoken to all the clients.

The Future Simple has a pleasant surprise in it: the endings are the same for every verb, regular or irregular, and for most verbs they attach to the whole infinitive rather than to a stem. Hablar becomes hablaré, comer becomes comeré, vivir becomes viviré. A dozen or so common verbs change the stem before the same endings go on, so tener gives tendré and hacer gives haré, and those are worth learning as a small set. The Conditional is built the same way with a different set of endings and the same modified stems, so learning one gets you most of the other.

Am Going To does a great deal of the everyday future work, exactly as "I'm going to" does in English, and the Academy notes that this way of expressing the future is more characteristic of American Spanish than European. If you only take two future tenses away from this page, take Am Going To and the Future Simple.

The past tenses

Tense	Used for	Example
Preterite	Completed events at a specific moment. Watch for ayer, el lunes, una vez, de repente.	Ella habló con su jefe ayer.She spoke to her boss yesterday.
Imperfect	Habits, repeated actions and background description. Watch for siempre, cuando era niño, de pequeño.	De pequeña hablaba sola cuando jugaba.As a child I used to talk to myself when I played.
Past Progressive	Something in progress when something else happened.	Estaba hablando con ella cuando llegó el jefe.I was talking to her when the boss arrived.
Pluperfect	The earlier of two past events, the past of the past. In English, had plus a past participle.	Ya había hablado con el médico antes de la operación.I had already spoken to the doctor before the operation.
Was Going To	Past intentions that did not happen. Often followed by pero.	Iba a hablar con ella, pero se me olvidó.I was going to talk to her, but I forgot.
Conditional	Hypothetical situations, things you would do under certain conditions. Usually "would" in English.	Hablaría con ella, pero no tengo su número.I would talk to her, but I do not have her number.
Conditional Perfect	Hypothetical past actions that did not happen. In English, would have plus a past participle.	Habría hablado con él, pero no me lo dijiste.I would have spoken to him, but you did not tell me.

The Conditional is filed with the past group in the app, though it is really describing something unreal rather than something past. It earns its place here because of the company it keeps: it pairs constantly with the Past Subjunctive, as in si tuviera tiempo, hablaría con ella, if I had time, I would talk to her.

The subjunctive: not a time at all

Here is the idea that unlocks it, and it is worth reading twice. The subjunctive is not about when something happens. It is about whether it is real, or whether one person is trying to get another person to act.

That is why it turns up after wishes, recommendations, doubts, emotions, and after time or condition words when the event has not happened yet:

Tense	Triggered by	Example
Present Subjunctive	A wish, suggestion, doubt or emotion in the present.	Quiero que estudies.I want you to study.
Past Subjunctive	The same triggers, once the wishing or doubting itself is in the past. Also the "if" half of a hypothetical.	Quería que estudiaras.I wanted you to study.

Two rules carry most of it. Only the second verb, the one after que, goes into the subjunctive; the trigger phrase in front stays in its normal tense. And there are normally two different people involved: the one doing the wanting, and the one being wanted to act. I want you to study.

There is one deliberate trap to know about. Verbs of thinking and believing work the opposite way round from verbs of wanting. Creo que and pienso que take the ordinary present, because you are stating something you hold to be true. Negate them, and doubt creeps in, and with it the subjunctive: no creo que tenga razón, I don't think he's right.

Where commands fit

Commands are worth a mention here because they are so often miscounted as a tense. They aren't one. Commands are a mood, like the subjunctive, and they are closely related to it: every negative command, and every usted, nosotros and ustedes command, uses Present Subjunctive forms.

¡Habla más despacio! is a positive tú command, speak more slowly. ¡No hables tan rápido! is the negative, don't speak so fast, and there is the subjunctive doing its second job. There is no yo command, for the obvious reason that you do not order yourself about, and no ellos command either.

What actually makes tenses hard

It is worth being straight about this, because it changes how you should practise.

The endings are the easy part. They are regular, they repeat, and a week of attention gets you most of the way. What takes longer is choosing: standing in a real conversation, wanting to say something about last summer, and having to pick between the Preterite and the Imperfect before the sentence comes out. That choice is not a memory problem, it is a judgement you build by seeing the same pair contrasted again and again in real sentences.

The second thing that catches people is that Spanish and English do not line up one to one. "I have spoken" and he hablado look like the same tense, and usually are, until you cross from Spain to Latin America and the habit shifts. "I was talking" could be the Past Progressive or the Imperfect depending on what the sentence is doing. Learning a tense as an English label attached to a Spanish ending will get you to a certain level and then quietly stop working.

Where to start

If the 16 still feel like a wall, here is an order that works, and it is roughly the order the app presents them in.

• Present Simple first, until it is automatic. Other tenses are built on it, including the whole subjunctive.
• Then one past and one future, so you can tell a story and make a plan: the Preterite, and Am Going To.
• Then the Imperfect, specifically against the Preterite, not on its own. The choosing is the skill.
• Then the two "machine" patterns: estar plus -ando or -iendo, and haber plus a past participle. Those two unlock seven tenses between them.
• The subjunctive last, and not because it is hardest. It is because it makes far more sense once you already have the tenses it borrows its forms from.

However you count them, the number is a fact about the language, not a warning. Nobody learns them all in a fortnight, and nobody needs all 16 to hold a conversation. Learn the ones that let you say what you actually want to say, in the order above, and the rest fill themselves in.