Commands build on what you already know.Same for the various progressive tenses (like estoy comiendo and estaba bailando), except that here you probably already know how to conjugate estar, so all you need to learn is the present participle (the -ando/-iendo thing), which again has a few irregulars (like durmiendo and leyendo) which are predictable once you get the hang of them. The perfect tenses with haber (like he comido) all use the same participle (the -ado/-ido thing), so once you (i) memorize a few irregular participles (like escrito) and (ii) know how to conjugate haber in the tense of your choosing, you are set.The future and conditional are a piece of cake because you aren’t really conjugating, you’re just sticking endings onto the infinitive, and these endings are identical for -ar, -er, and -ir verbs. Although there are a bunch of irregulars, they all evolved to simplify pronunciation, so they feel good in your mouth.And the imperfect subjunctive actually has two possible sets of endings ( -ra and -se), though learners can just stick with the -ra set. However, the present subjunctive does have six irregulars of its own. It helps that -er and -ir verbs have the same endings in the present subjunctive, and that -ar, -er, and -ir verbs ALL follow the same conjugation pattern in the past (“imperfect”) subjunctive (starting with the ellos/ellas/ustedes form of the preterite). This means that once you have learned the latter it’s mostly a matter of getting used to a somewhat different set of endings. For historical reasons, the two subjunctive (present and past) conjugations are similar to the normal (“indicative”) present and the preterite, respectively.My basic advice is to “divide and conquer.” I have a nice summary on my Teaching page (look for “Todo el pretérito”). The preterite, like the present, has tons of irregulars, but at least -er and -ir verbs have the same endings.The imperfect is super-easy because (i) -er and -ir verbs have the same endings and (ii) there are only three irregulars.The present tense takes a lot of practice because (i) it is usually the first tense you study, (ii) -ar, -er, and -ir verbs have distinct endings, and (iii) there are a lot of irregulars.And of course, the longer-term challenge is knowing WHEN to use each conjugation. In this effort I wasn’t careful to distinguish tense, aspect, and mood life is too short. But I also summarized the different conjugations, lumping them into eight groups from a learner’s perspective. I recommended, as always, for verb practice. The question was how to learn Spanish verb conjugations. I just wrote out some thoughts on Spanish verb conjugations in order to answer a question on Reddit, and thought they might be of more general interest.
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