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Los cuatro irregulares — The Four Irregular Verbs
📚 Los cuatro irregulares — The Four Irregular Verbs
These four verbs appear in nearly every GCSE task. Learn their present-tense forms and you unlock a huge range of sentence structures for speaking and writing.
| Persona | hacer (to do/make) | querer (to want) | poder (to be able to) | volver (to return) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yo | hago | quiero | puedo | vuelvo |
| tú | haces | quieres | puedes | vuelves |
| él/ella | hace | quiere | puede | vuelve |
| nosotros | hacemos | queremos | podemos | volvemos |
| ustedes | hacen | quieren | pueden | vuelven |
Note: querer, poder, and volver are stem-changing verbs — the stem vowel changes in all persons EXCEPT nosotros.
El patrón de la bota — The Boot/Stem-Change Pattern
Three of these verbs follow the boot pattern (also called the L-shape). Draw a boot shape around yo, tú, él/ella, and ustedes — every form inside the boot changes its stem vowel. Nosotros sits outside the boot and keeps the original vowel.
Earn the mark scheme marks
💡 Exam Tips — Key Irregular Verbs
- hago — not haco. The yo form of hacer is the only irregular part. All other present forms (haces, hace, hacemos, hacen) are regular. Write hago every time — AO3 marks depend on it.
- Nosotros never stem-changes. querer → queremos ✓, poder → podemos ✓, volver → volvemos ✓. Never write queremos with an ie — the nosotros form sits outside the boot and keeps the original vowel.
- Weather uses hacer — not ser or estar. It is always hace calor / hace frío / hace sol. Writing es calor or está caliente for weather is a mark-losing error. Examiners note this every session.
- ¿Puedo + infinitivo? → is the standard polite request formula. Use puedo (yo form) or ¿Puedes ayudarme? (tú form) in role-play speaking tasks. Examiners credit accurate modal + infinitivo constructions under AO2.
- Volver vs volverte. volver = to return (physical). volverse + adjective = to become (change of state). These are two different verbs — do not confuse them in Higher writing.