The verb Ser is the number-one most-used verb in Spanish—but it’s also highly irregular. (Many of its common forms, like eres, sea, fuera, and son, don’t look anything like each other!)
But there’s good news: There are just 10 forms that Spanish speakers use most of the time. By learning those 10 forms, you can express almost anything you need for everyday conversation.
Master the verb Ser using this guide, video, and flashcards!
Let’s start by listing out the top 10 forms of Ser.
We chose these words based on a frequency analysis of Spanish spoken by native Spanish speakers. According to this analysis, there are 200 words that make up about 58% of all words spoken in Spanish. And that list of 200 words includes only these 10 forms of Ser:
Let’s dive in and practice using all of these.
For extra practice, you should first download the flashcards that I created for this guide. Each flashcard has a sentence example using a common form of Ser, with the English on one side and the Spanish on the other, for a total of 40 flashcards.
Let’s start our guide with the present tense. Here are the top 4 present-tense forms, in order of frequency:
(You might notice that the nosotros and vosotros forms are missing; that’s because they don’t make it to the top 10 list, so we won’t focus on those for now.)
Here are some sample sentences:
Notice that all of these sentences describe what someone or something is. As you might know, the Spanish language has two verbs for “to be”: Ser and Estar. In this guide, we’re just focused on Ser, which is the verb that describes what something is. (For more tips on how to choose between the two verbs, here’s a video that dives into Ser versus Estar.)
Now let’s get some practice with these. See if you can guess the correct form of Ser for each sentence!
Answers:
Next let’s look at the past tense, and to do this we have to talk about two different ways to describe the past.
Let’s start with the most common form, the word era, which means “was” as in “he/she/it was”. For example:
As you can see, we’re describing what she was in the past. We use the word era when we’re describing a general length of time in the past.
But there’s another way to describe the past. Let’s say a friend asks you how the party you went to last night was. In English, you might answer:
In Spanish, this would be:
So here we used the word fue, which is another way of saying “was”. You’ll use fue instead of era when you’re describing an event, something that happened at a particular moment or period of time.
Now let’s practice the words era and fue. Remember that era is the one you’ll choose by default, but if the word “was” describes a one-time event, you’ll use fue.
Answers:
Now let’s talk about the future. In Spanish, the most common way to talk about what something will be is with the form será. It literally translates to “will be”, as in “he/she/it will be”.
Here are some examples:
Next, we have the infinitive, ser, which basically just means “to be”. This is considered an unconjugated form, which simply means it doesn’t change based on who it’s referring to.
The easiest way to practice is along with the verb Querer. So for example, quiero ser means “I want to be” and quieres ser means “you want to be”.
Here are some examples in full sentences:
Notice how the word ser doesn’t change. The only word that that changes is the verb Querer, which is conjugated for the different people.
Let’s get some practice with this. Choose between the future tense, será, and the unconjugated form, ser.
Answers:
Let’s wrap up by learning a couple of subjunctive forms.
We’ll start with the word sea, which means something like “be”, as in “he be”, “she be”, or “it be”. This sounds kind of weird to English speakers, but there are lots of situations where you’ll use this in Spanish.
For now, let’s focus on situations where we want or intend something to be a certain way. So for example:
This is literally “I want that he be my friend”. We’re expressing our intention for this person, which is a very typical way of using the subjunctive.
Let’s look at a couple more examples.
Next, let’s look at just one more form: the word fuera, which in technical terms is a past subjunctive. The most common use of fuera is to express something hypothetical.
For example, check out this sentence in English:
So why do we say “I were”? Normally we say “I was”, but in hypothetical situations we often say “I were”. And that’s where you would use fuera. So this would be:
And this is actually super common in everyday speech! So it’s worth practicing. Here’s another example:
Let’s practice sea and fuera. Try to choose the correct form.
Answers:
Ready to get even better at this? Your next step is to use our flashcards for deeper practice. Download our flashcards here — they’ll include all the examples we covered and more! That way, you can shuffle them all together and practice all these different and important ways of using Ser.
