Introduction to Regular Participles

Participles are parts of grammar that can't stand alone. The basic rule of thumb of forming participles is to drop the suffix of the infinitive(by now you should know that these can either be -ar, -er, or -ir) and add a new set of endings. Broken down into -ar verbs and -er/-ir verbs, the endings are as follows:

-AR Verbs: -ado, -ada, -ados, -adas

-ER/-IR Verbs: -ido, -ida, -idos, -idas

The four forms of these participles represent nouns that are singular masculine, singular feminine, plural masculine, and plural feminine, respectively.

Each of these new endings are placed onto the root of the word after the suffix of the infinitive has been dropped. For the word mirar for example, our participle is mirado. By default, the particple remains in the singular masculine and is the version used in conjunction with the auxiliary verb haber, which will be introduced to you at a later time.

One more example is the infinitive pedir. Dropping the -ir at the end of the word gives us the root, ped-; now, we can add the default participle ending which is -ido and we are left with the participle pedido, which can then be tacked onto a noun to function as an adjective, or augmented onto haber to form the sentence "to have + done something..."

If this is your first venture into the world of participles, this certainly won't be your last. They indeed make up an enormous chunk of Spanish dialect, so be on the ready when reading an article from a Spanish newspaper or listening to someone speak.

Sigue estudiando,

Professor Joel