Conjugating the Spanish Verb Escuchar (to Listen)

Spanish verbs fall into different groups, and each group is conjugated a little differently. If you’re going to master Spanish verbs like escuchar, you need to be able to identify which group a verb belongs to: regular (follows regular conjugation rules for -ar, -er, and -ir verbs), stem-changing (morphs depending on how you use it in a sentence), spelling-changing (has consonant-spelling changes in some forms to follow pronunciation rules), or reflexive (reflects the action back on the subject of the sentence).

Escuchar (ehs-koo-chahr) (to listen) is a regular verb of the -ar persuasion, so its conjugation is pretty straightforward. Here it is in the present tense:

The following examples show you escuchar in action:

• Escucho su música con mucha atención. (I listen to his music with a lot of attention.)

• ¿Escuchas la radio todos los días? (Do you listen to the radio every day?)

Need to know how to conjugate escuchar in another tense? The following tables show you the preterit, imperfect, and future forms.

Use the preterit tense like this:

• Si escuchaste mi mensaje, sabrás la verdad. (If you listened to my message you will know the truth.)

• Ellos escucharon el comentario y se fueron. (They listened to the comment and left.)

Here are some examples of the imperfect tense:

• Mis padres escuchaban boleros todos los sábados. (My parents used to listen to boleros every Saturday.)

• Escuchábamos cuentos en la Navidad. (We used to listen to stories during Christmas.)

The following samples put the future tense to work:

• ¿Escucharás la radio este fin de semana? (Will you listen to the radio this weekend?)

• Sí, escucharé la radio el sábado. (Yes, I’ll listen to the radio on Saturday.)