Verb lists
The Most Common Spanish Verbs to Learn First
A few dozen verbs do most of the work in everyday Spanish. Learn these first and you'll understand and say far more, far sooner. Each one links to its complete conjugation.
If you are starting Spanish, the question isn’t which 9,000 verbs exist. It’s which ones do you actually need. The answer is encouraging: a small set of high-frequency verbs shows up constantly, so learning them first pays off immediately.
The list below is ordered roughly by how often each verb appears in everyday Spanish. Tap any verb to see its full conjugation: every tense and mood, with the irregular forms marked and example sentences for each.
Start with these
Why frequency order beats alphabetical order
Most verb lists are alphabetical, which is fine for looking something up but useless for deciding what to study. You don’t need abandonar before ser.
The verbs at the top of this list are the ones you’ll use in your first real conversations: ser and estar (the two ways to say “to be”), tener (to have), ir (to go), hacer (to do or make), and poder (to be able to). Get comfortable with these and most sentences open up.
A lot of the common ones are irregular
Here’s the catch that trips up beginners: the most useful verbs are often the least regular. Ser, ir, tener, hacer, decir, and poder all break the standard patterns. That isn’t bad luck. Words get used so often that their forms wear down into irregular shapes over centuries.
So don’t wait until you’ve “mastered regular verbs” to touch the irregular ones. You’ll meet soy, voy, and tengo on day one. Each conjugation page marks exactly which forms are irregular, which is the stem changing, and which follow the regular pattern, so you can see at a glance what to memorize.
How to actually learn them
Reading a conjugation table is not the same as recalling it when you need it. The fastest way to make a form stick is to produce it: cover the answer, say or type the conjugation, then check.
That’s the idea behind Conjugo. You type the form instead of picking it from a list, which is the part that builds real recall. Every verb on this page is in the app, with example sentences for each form, and it all works offline.