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© Samuel Haldane 2005-2006

Castilian Spanish Verbs:
Lesson 9: The conditional
The conditional is formed by adding -ría after the stem vowel, then adding the personal endings (as for the imperfect).

'I'	'you (singular)'	'He/she/it'	'We'	'You (plural)'	'They'
(none)	-s	(none)	-mos	-is	-n

This gives us the following forms:

Person	a-verb: cantar 'to sing'	e-verb: beber 'to drink'
1S 'I'	cantaría 'I would sing'	bebería 'I would drink'
2S 'you (singular)'	cantarías 'you would sing'	beberías 'you would drink'
3S 'he/she/it'	cantaría 'he/she/it would sing'	bebería 'he/she/it would drink'
1P 'we'	cantaríamos 'we would sing'	beberíamos 'we would drink'
2P 'you (plural)'	cantaríais 'you would sing'	beberíais 'you would drink'
3P 'they'	cantarían 'they would sing'	beberían 'they would drink'

The conditional roughly means 'would' or 'could'. For instance, me gusta means 'it pleases me' (= 'I like it'); the conditional me gustaría means 'it would please me' (= 'I would like it').

The ending -ría is made up from parts which you have already met in earlier lessons. First there is the future stem (which is the infintive) formed by adding -r. After that is the imperfect ending -ía. In effect we are taking a future form and adding a past ending to it, which should create a meaning like 'in the past, it was in the future' - in other words, 'I was going to do it'. Note the similarity with English, which uses I was going to for things that are not certain, eg. I was going to do the washing today, but there might not be enough time.

If you look at the whole of the conditional ending, it appears to have quite long forms, such as -ríamos. But in fact it is a series of short endings combined:

root	stem vowel	future	imperf	person (1P)	final form
cant-	-a	-r	-ía	-mos	cantaríamos

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