The future tense in Spanish is most definitely one of the easiest Spanish tenses to master because there are basically only a dozen regularly used verbs considered irregular in conjugation.
The Spanish future tense is one of those rare tenses in Spanish for the reason that it is extremely regular when conjugated. There are very few verbs that are physically irregular Spanish verbs.
What is an even bigger surprise is that those verbs that are irregular, are not too complicated to learn as they each follow a easily recognized pattern making Spanish verb conjugation much simpler…more about that in a short while to start with however, I will first cover the conjugation of regular verbs in the future tense.
The first big point is that each of the verb groups, the -er, -ir and -ar verb groups, have different endings in most of the other tenses in Spanish, in the future tense they all share exactly the same endings! These endings are joined to the infinitive of the verb being conjugated. For example:
Hablar - ‘to speak‘
- hablaré I will speak
- hablarás you will speak
- hablará he, she or it will speak
- hablaremos we will speak
- hablaréis you will speak (plural)
- hablarán they will speak
This conjugation applies to all verbs in Spanish as already mentioned but there are a small number of irregular verbs that are used frequently. As with the regular verbs the endings are exactly the same, however what makes these verbs irregular is that there are irregularities in the stem of each of them. Thankfully, these irregular stem changes are used throughout the conjugation, so even the irregular verbs are pretty regular!
The irregular verbs in the future tense, accompanied by the irregular stem change are:
- caber ‘to fit’ or ‘to be possible’ - caber becomes cabr
- decir ‘to say’ - decir becomes dir
- haber ‘to have’ - haber becomes habr
- hacer ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ - hacer becomes har
- poder ‘to be able to’ or ‘can’ - poder becomes podre
- poner ‘to put’ - poner becomes pondr
- querer ‘to want’ - querer becomes querr
- saber ‘to know’ - saber becomes sabr
- salir ‘to leave’ - salir becomes saldr
- tener ‘to have’ - tener becomes tendr
- valer ‘to cost’ - valer becomes valdr
- venir ‘to come’ - venir becomes vendr
Always remember that the future tense for irregular verbs are formed exactly as for regular verbs and that the irregular stems are simply replacing the full infinitive.