Conditional sentences – some tricks

THIS week is the turn of the Conditional tense.

You may well be wondering how many tenses there are in Spanish and the answer is, absolutely loads.

There are far more tenses than any language could reasonably need and therefore we can often get away with two or three alternatives to say the same, or pretty much the same, thing.

That is meant to encourage you rather than the opposite, but that might partly depend on how anal you are about being ‘correct’. That’s basically your problem though!

Anyway, this week’s tense is relatively acceptable in as much as we can form it, and translate it, fairly easily.

There is a fiddly bit about how to use it which I’ll mention at the end.

Firstly, we’ll look at the formation of the tense, which is based on the same principle as the Future Simple.

Remember that the future simple tense adds its endings on to the whole infinitive of the verb (hablar – hablaré etc.)

Well, the conditional does exactly the same thing, and also has the same endings in all three verb groups, again like the future simple. Here are the endings:

- ía - íamos

- ías - íais

- ía - ían

So name any old verb and we’ll put it into the conditional.

What about an ‘er’ verb for a change? For example ‘leer’ (to read).

As far as the pronunciation is concerned, the most important thing to remember is to place the emphasis where the accent is, in each case over the letter ‘i’.

Leería Leeríamos Leerías Leeríais Leería Leerían The irregular ones are exactly the same as in the future simple tense.

For example:

Decir – diría hacer – haría poder – podría poner – pondría querer – querría saber – sabría salir – saldría tener – tendría valer – valdría venir – vendría

Finally, how do we use the conditional tense? Well, as I mentioned last week, the clue is in the name.

It is called ‘conditional’ because its use implies the existence of a condition.

‘I would read the book … if it were interesting; if I had the time’.

‘Leería el libro … si (if) fuera interesante; Si tuviera tiempo .

And now we come across a new problem, which is that the ‘if’ clause (if it were, if I had etc.) takes us into yet another tense, and furthermore one of the hardest ones of all, namely the imperfect subjunctive - aaarrrghhhh!!

However, do not panic, simply apply the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) and find a way round it, using the word ‘pero’ (but).

‘I would read the book, but it isn’t interesting’

(Leería el libro, pero no es interesante).

‘I would read the book, but I haven’t got time’

(Leería el libro, pero no tengo tiempo).

I don’t know what you’d do without me; you would be very confused! -

No se lo que haris sin me, Estaríais muy confundidos.