Irregular Familiar Commands You’ll Use Daily

The word command can sound so harsh, but in reality, we use commands every day. Familiar commands are some of the most common terms that you’ll hear and say! Commands aren’t just when you’re bossy and telling someone what to do, but rather words that give direction instead of a suggestion. Take a look at these common irregular commands.

Regular familiar commands

Do you remember learning how to give familiar commands in Spanish? If I want to tell someone, “Bring the sandwich”, I would say “Trae el bocadillo.” If I wanted to tell someone, “Smile!” when taking their picture, I would say “¡Sonríe!” Do you see a pattern in these phrases? There are two ways you can think about forming regular familiar commands that get you the same result:

1. Use the tú form and drop the -s at the end. If you go to the tú form of these verbs, you get traes and sonries. Then, you drop the last -s, almost to get the point across faster.
2. Use the él/ella/usted form. In these examples, trae and sonríe are both the third person singular form of the verb.

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Whichever of these two tricks makes sense to you, you can use it to form most types of commands.

Common irregulars

As with all grammatical rules, there are exceptions. These irregular familiar commands happen to be some of the most common words in the Spanish language! These are all shorter than the other familiar commands, which makes sense to try and be as efficient as possible. Many of these verbs are irregular in other forms as well.

• Ten (tener)
• Pon (poner)
• Ven (venir)
• Sal (salir)
• Haz (hacer)
• Di (decir)
• Ve (ver)
• Sé (ser)

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In addition to giving commands, you might see these when inviting a friend to an activity, reading books about motivational speakers, training a pet, etc. There are tons of reasons why you’d use these, which is why they’re so common to hear and say. Now that you know them, you’ll likely hear them everywhere!