Digo... dijo... dicho... dije... dile...
Why does the verb Decir have such weird conjugations, and how can you choose the right one to use?
Sure, Decir is a very irregular verb with over 50 forms, but the good news is that most of the time, Spanish speakers only use 10 of them for everyday conversation. In this video and guide, I’ll walk you through each of those essential forms of Decir.
In this video, we cover those 10 forms of Decir and how to use them correctly. Plus we practice using each of them with quizzes, and we walk through how to use Decir to mean “tell” versus “say”.
If you want to practice even more, download our free flashcards to practice all of this!
Let’s start by looking at a list of the top 10 forms of Decir.
We chose these words based on a frequency analysis of Spanish spoken by native Spanish speakers. According to this analysis, there are 500 words that make up over 65% of all words spoken in Spanish, and that list of 500 words includes only 10 forms of Decir.
Those forms include 4 present-tense forms, 3 past-tense forms, the infinitive, the participle, and an imperative:
Let’s learn how to use all of these!
Unlike most common verbs, Decir is used more often in the past tense rather than the present. That’s because of how often we talk about what someone said in the past. For example, “I said that yesterday”, “he said those things”, and “you already said that”.
Let’s look at the three most common past-tense forms:
Of course, there are other past-tense forms, but they don’t make it to the top ten, so we’ll focus on these three.
Here are some simple examples:
Let’s practice this a bit. Can you remember which form of Decir to use? (Choose from dije, dijo, and dijiste.)
Answers:
Let’s keep practicing these three past-tense forms of Decir, but we’ll stretch them a bit further. The verb Decir is used in lots of different ways, especially in the past tense. Half the time, instead of being translated as “said”, it’s instead translated as “told”.
For example, let’s look again at these three sentences we used earlier, which all use “said” in the English version:
And then let’s change them all slightly. Now we’ll use “told” in the English version:
So wait a minute, what’s the difference between “said” and “told”? Why are they different verbs in English but the same verb in Spanish?
Well, let’s look at this first sentence: “I said that yesterday”. In this case, I’m emphasizing what I said, “that”. But I’m not specifying who I said it to.
But when we change it to “I told you that yesterday”, I’m mentioning who I said it to (you). In these cases, in English, we tend to say “told” rather than “said”.
And notice that in the Spanish versions of these sentences, there’s only one change: It’s the little word right before the conjugation of Decir. So we have te dije, le dijo, and me dijiste.
These tiny words are what we call indirect objects. (If you want to learn more about these, check out the LearnCraft Spanish Podcast, which explores essential pronouns in detail.)
For now, let’s use indirect objects to help us use Decir. We’ll focus on these three:
Let’s see if you can tell when you’d use these words. For example, how would you say this in Spanish?
In this case, I didn’t mention who I said this to, so we don’t say “told”. So this is simply:
But what about this one:
In this case, we’re mentioning who we told something to, so we’ll use one of these indirect objects, specifically le. And the le goes right before the verb. So we get:
Next, how about this one:
In this case, we know we need one of these little indirect object pronouns because we have the word “told”. And in this case, it’s “you”, which is te. The te goes right before dije, so we have:
Let’s get a little more practice with all of these past-tense forms of Decir. Some of these examples use indirect objects and some of them don’t. For each of these, see if you can predict if it’s dije, dijo, or dijiste, as well as which indirect object to use.
Answers:
Next let’s take a look at four present-tense forms of Decir that you’ll use all the time:
(Of course, it’s important to point out that these can also mean “I tell”, “he/she tells”, “you tell”, and “they tell”.)
So when is it that we’ll use the present-tense forms of Decir? Well, check out this sentence in English:
In this example, we’re using the present tense to describe something that happens all the time. This happens both in English and in Spanish. Here’s the Spanish version:
As another example:
So in this case we used the word “tell” and we also used an indirect object.
Let’s get a little bit of practice with flashcards that use these present-tense forms of Decir.
See if you can fill in the blank with the right form of Decir (digo, dice, dices, or dicen), as well as an indirect object when relevant.
Answers:
Our next form to work on is the infinitive, decir. This is what we call an unconjugated form, which means it doesn’t change based on who it’s referring to.
The simplest way to practice this is with the verb Querer, which means “to want”. For example, check out these three sentences:
In each case, the word decir stays the same; it’s not conjugated!
A similar word is dicho. This means “said”, as the past participle of the verb Decir. A participle is kind of like a past-tense form, but it doesn’t change based on who is doing it. Here are a couple of examples:
Let’s practice both decir and dicho a little bit. Try to guess the right one.
Answers:
To wrap up, let’s move on to imperatives - which are commands. This is how you’ll tell someone to say something.
The simplest version is di. For example:
But it’s actually not so common to use di by itself. Instead, remember what we said earlier about “say” versus “tell”? When you’re telling someone to say something, it’s much more common to phrase it as “tell me something” or “tell her something”. So you’re going to need these strange words:
If those endings look familiar, it’s because they’re exactly the same as two of the indirect objects that we talked about earlier in this guide. These words come from di combined with le and me.
So here are some examples:
Let’s get some practice with dile and dime.
Answers:
Ready to get even better at this? We have a set of 40 flashcards you can download for free. It includes all the examples from this guide and even more. With these flashcards you can get lots of active practice with all the most common uses of the verb Decir. Enjoy!
