Frolicking in Spanish Conjugation

September 13, 2026 at 01:49 PM EST

Coding a rudimentary Spanish verb conjugator

language

programming

react

spanish

Intro

For any average Spanish learner, verb conjugations are particularily difficult to wrap your head around. In my experience, a mix of table drilling, reading the news, and speaking with native speakers produces satisfactory results.^1. Verbs are all the more better practiced when applying them to your personal world. If you’re into snowboarding, learning the conjugation of verbs like slide, jump and fall on your behind is ideal for describing your exhilarating glades.

Another decent strategy is actively listening to your favourite episode of a TV show on repeat with Spanish subtitles and/or audio, while getting a feel for how they’re applied — my go-to media is Slam Dunk.

Joe’s Conjugator

If I may, I recommend downloading the Spanish verb conjugation app called ConjuGato to refresh your memory on all the available patterns, since the app does a terrific job at supplying comprehensive tables with explanations.

Out of curiosity for its inner workings, I put my own spin on coding a basic conjugator as an exercise. In sum, working around the irregular verbs was simultaneously stimulating and frustrating, because the exceptions can be found in the stem, the ending or both.

For example, the verb poder is irregular in the indicative preterite form, as every “o” in its stem gets replaced with “u”. Moreover, the first and third singular person have irregular endings where í changes to e and ío changes to ó respectively.

In the Joe conjugator ^2., the irregular changes on the stem are highlighted in green for substituted/added letters and underlined for removed letters. Irregular endings are highlighted in red. Wild verb conjugations defying human logic, in highly irregular verbs such as ser and ir, are marked in blue. For comparison purposes, tapping the Show Unmodified button allows you to see the conjugation had we ignored the rules and conjugated with the standard rules (not explained in this post). ^3.

Footnotes

1. Eventually, drilling tables becomes less meaningful once you develop your verb muscles.

2. By all means, please use dedicated applications to practice conjugation, because my tool is missing verbs and potentially has mistakes. On another note, the source code is found here.

3. I’m happy I thought of integrating this feature.

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