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Let’s wrap up learning Estar by working on estará, estaría, estarían, estarías, estaríamos, and estado.
Let’s finish learning Estar.
Intro: Join us on a rigorous, step-by-step journey to fluency. I’m Timothy and this is LearnCraft Spanish.
Today we’re going to learn the last of our essential conjugations of Estar, including the future, the conditional, and the participle. We’ll also get some practice using all of our forms of Estar and all of our forms of Ser in real sentence contexts.
Let’s start with the future of Estar. For Ser, we learned será to mean “he will be”, “she will be”, “it will be”, or “usted will be”. The word estará is similar, it’s the third person singular in the future. For example,
She will be at the place.
Ella estará en el lugar.
Notice the pattern between será and estará — we have the infinitive, plus the letter A with an accent mark at the end, so the syllable “rah!” is emphasized in both cases. This is a pattern common to most verbs for forming the future tense of the third person.
The future tense of the first person, “I will be”, emphasizes re instead. So it’s estaré. Maybe imagine that you yourself use a magic wand that shoots a ray of light out of it into the future. Estaré. Here’s a sentence example.
I will be at home when you are here.
Estaré en casa cuando estés aquí.
This specific modification also works for Ser; the word seré means “I will be”. For example,
I will be your friend.
Seré tu amigo.
Speaking of patterns that are consistent across verbs, we learned that sería means “would be” for Ser. Similarly, estaría means “would be” for Estar. For example:
I would be in the good place.
Yo estaría en el buen lugar.
She would be at my house?
¿Ella estaría en mi casa?
In fact, as a universal pattern, every single Spanish verb conjugation that uses the word “would” in English has a stress on ría. You’ll see this consistently as we learn more and more verbs going forward; just as some random examples, “I would eat” is comería, “she would walk” is caminaría, and “he would go” is iría. So the sound of ría in Spanish is very common, about as common as the word “would” in English.
And for the verb Estar, it’s actually really easy to talk about where anybody “would be”; you just take the word estaría, and then you can slightly modify it for the person you’re talking about. For “they”, it’s estarían. For example, “the pandas would be here” is “the pandas estarían aquí. “We would be here” is estaríamos aquí. And “you would be at home” is estarías en casa.
Let’s practice all of our Estar conditionals a little bit.
She would be here and I wouldn’t know what to do.
Ella estaría aquí y yo no would know qué to do.
Ella estaría aquí y yo no sabría qué hacer.
But they would be at your house and we wouldn’t.
Pero estarían en tu casa y nosotros no lo estaríamos.
So even in just the first few minutes of this episode, we’ve learned quite a few forms of Estar really fast. Learning verbs is going to get even faster, because the patterns will become more and more predictable as we go along. After we wrap up Ser and Estar this week, our general principle going forward will be to learn all the important conjugations of a verb in one go before moving on to the next verb. And you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can learn all the important forms of each new verb.
For now, we have just one more form of Estar to learn, and it’s the word estado, which means “been”. This is the unconjugated participle, similar to the word sido in Ser. And it’s the same for every person. For example, “I have been here” is yo have estado aquí, “they have been here” is ellos have estado aquí, and “he has been here” is él has estado aquí. The word estado doesn’t change.
Let’s practice using estado, but I’m going to make it a little tricky: One or two of these examples will actually be Ser examples, so you should use sido instead. So in each case, start by making sure whether the situation is Ser or Estar, and then pick the words to use.
We have been at their house.
We have estado en su casa.
Hemos estado en su casa.
The girls have been our friends.
Las chicas have sido nuestras amigas.
Las chicas han sido nuestras amigas.
He has been with your friends(m).
He has estado con tus amigos.
Ha estado con tus amigos.
Your friends have been good boys.
Tus amigos have sido buenos chicos.
Tus amigos han sido buenos chicos.
My girls have been well.
Mis chicas have estado bien.
Mis chicas han estado bien.
The boy, the one that was here, has been well.
El chico, el que estaba aquí, has estado bien.
El chico, el que estaba aquí, ha estado bien.
All right, now it’s time to celebrate the fact that you’ve finished learning all the most common forms of Ser and Estar — including some that students typically don’t learn for the first year or two of learning Spanish.
Let’s wrap up this episode by putting all of those skills into action with a big quiz that uses all our new conjugations of Ser and Estar. Remember, whenever you run into a “to be” word in English, start by deciding whether we’re dealing with Ser or Estar. Then find the right conjugation. And then, once you have the right verb form, add the other Spanish words that you know to the sentence. (And, as always, if you want to see these sentences written out, they’re all available at LCSPodcast.com/33.)
He’s the one that would be here.
Él es el que estaría aquí.
You have been a good friend(f).
You have sido una buena amiga.
Has sido una buena amiga.
Would it be the boy or the girl?
¿Sería el chico o la chica?
We would be fine with what you have.
Estaríamos bien con lo que you have.
Estaríamos bien con lo que tienes.
She would be his friend.
Ella sería su amiga.
He was at home for an hour.
Estuvo en casa por an hour.
Estuvo en casa por una hora.
Would you be here or would I be here?
¿Estarías tú aquí o estaría yo aquí?
Their friends(f) are being good.
Sus amigas están siendo buenas.
The house would be good.
La casa sería buena.
I will be your friend(f)!
¡Yo seré tu amiga!
We haven’t been here.
Nosotros no have estado aquí.
Nosotros no hemos estado aquí.
I would not be here.
Yo no estaría aquí.
She will be here when they(f) are.
Ella estará aquí cuando ellas lo estén.
We have not been here.
Nosotros no have estado aquí.
Nosotros no hemos estado aquí.
Would I be their friend? He will be.
¿Sería yo su amigo? Él lo será.
I will be the one(f) that is good.
Yo seré la que es buena.
They would be at the place but you wouldn’t be.
Ellos estarían en el lugar pero tú no lo estarías.
Would they be OK?
¿Estarían bien?
The strange thing is that he’s being weird.
Lo strange es que está siendo weird.
Lo extraño es que está siendo raro.
It will be a good house.
Será una buena casa.
I was OK after we arrived.
Estuve bien after we arrived.
Estuve bien después de que llegamos.
Will you(formal) be OK?
¿Usted estará bien?
We would be at home but she wouldn’t be.
Estaríamos en casa pero ella no lo estaría.
For more practice with all of this, go to LCSPodcast.com/33.
Tomorrow we have some fun, simple vocabulary, including some more nouns and the words for “this one” and “that one”.
This show is brought to you by LearnCraftSpanish.com. The Spanish voice in this episode was our coach Ximena Lama-Rondón. Our music was provided by the Seattle Marimba Quartet, and I’m Timothy, encouraging you to do the hard work of learning Spanish. Acquiring a second language is one of the most fulfilling things you can do, so start your fluency journey today at LCSPodcast.com.