Conditional or Potencial Simple

The Conditional Tense

The conditional is used in both Spanish and English to express:

An action that you would like to do if another thing were possible:

• "I would go on holiday if I had the money."

A conditional desire, or a courtesy:

• "I would like a glass of beer please."

Conjecture or a probability:

• "I wonder who that was." (the Conditional is used in Spanish here, althogh we speak in the past)

• "It was probably eight o'clock when they came." (Again, we don't use the Conditional here, but the Spaniards do.)

Thankfully, to form this tense, we don't need to know anything more than we already know. The endings of this tense are the same as the endings of the -er and -ir endings of the Imperfect Tense.

Also, like the future, we add the endings on to the Infinitive of the verb (To go, to eat etc.). The only iregular parts of the Conditional Tense are the bases, and they are the same as the Future Tense.

Go to next Verb - Present Subjunctive

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