AUDAZ REVISTA
The two easiest tenses in Spanish, and the one thing everyone gets wrong about them.
Future and conditional. One stem, twelve irregular verbs, an afternoon of work.
ONE STEM
Keep the whole infinitive
Hablar gives hablaré (I will speak) and hablaría (I would speak). No chopping. The same endings work for -ar, -er and -ir verbs.
Comeré, comería. Viviré, viviría.
12 VERBS
The irregulars are shared
Tener, poner, salir, valer, venir. Saber, querer, poder, caber, haber. Hacer, decir. Learn the future stem once and the conditional comes free.
Tendré, tendría. Diré, diría.
MEMORY HOOK
Di, haz, sal, pon, ten, ven
Six of the twelve also have a chopped tú command. The verbs that shorten in the imperative are the verbs that shorten in the future.
Ven aquí. Vendré mañana.
B1, NOT A1
Nobody teaches them first, on purpose
The Instituto Cervantes puts ir a + infinitive at A2 and the -ré future and -ría conditional at B1. Reported speech and unreal if-sentences wait until B2.
Source: Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes.
28.9%
How often natives picked the -ré future
In a study of 151 learners and 22 native speakers, natives chose ir a in 57.3% of future contexts and the -ré future in 28.9%.
Source: Gudmestad and Geeslin (2013).
40.7%
Fourth-semester learners overused it
Level 1 chose the -ré future 12.2% of the time. Level 2, freshly taught, chose it 40.7%. The rate then fell with every level toward the native figure.
The authors call the jump an instructional effect.
THE REAL JOB
The future is for guessing
Serán las once does not mean it will be eleven. It means it must be about eleven. Será bonita, pero no me gusta is a shrug, not a prediction.
The Cervantes inventory calls it the futuro de probabilidad.
AFTER-PAST
The conditional is the future of the past
Dijo que volvería a Nápoles: he said he would return to Naples. The return sits after the saying. The RAE lists pospretérito as a synonym.
Source: RAE, Glosario de términos gramaticales.
IN NOVELS
It also narrates things that really happened
Meses más tarde se convertiría en su peor pesadilla. The RAE calls this the narrative or factual conditional. Common in biographies, rare in speech.
You will meet it in chapter one.
NEVER
Si tendría
The si clause takes the imperfect subjunctive. The conditional waits in the result: Si tuviera dinero, te haría un buen regalo. The RAE calls si tendría widely discredited in educated speech.
THE PLAN
Use ir a for plans, -ré for guesses, -ría after dijo que
Learn the twelve stems in an afternoon. Then read, and hunt for -ría after dijo que in a novel. That is where the conditional lives.
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