Sunday, July 8, 2012

How To Express "Let's..." for Non-Reflexive Verbs

A student asked me today how to issue a suggestive command in the first person plural (i.e. the nosotros form), which is to say she wished to express "Let's..." as in "Let's eat" or "Let's stop", etc.

The way we do that is by using the first person plural command form, which is in the subjunctive conjugation.  Because they follow subjunctive verb conjugations, we must use the opposite vowel for the suffix (for -ar verbs, it is an "-e" based suffix and for -er/ir verbs it is an "-a" based suffix).

Comamos.  Let's eat. (from the verb comer)
Manejemos al parque.  Let's drive to the park. (from the verb manejar)
Pidamos un helado.  Let's ask for an ice cream cone.  (from the verb pedir)


Keep in mind that these are non-reflexive verbs ONLY; the reflexive verbs are slightly more difficult and foster many irregularities.

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