Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Conjugations
Modal verbs are “helper” verbs (action words) that help us to express a
concept, without having to worry so much about the grammar of conjugation.
You may remember this concept, which was introduced briefly in the previous
chapter.
Conjugation is how words change depending on who is doing the action.
So, in English, for the verb “to be” we have “I am,” “you are,” and “he/she/it
is.” Conjugation also affects the verb tense, indicating the time the action takes
place: “I am” (present tense) becomes “I will be” (future tense) and “I was”
(past tense). If there were no conjugation in English, then we would use “be”
in place of “am,” “are,” “is,” “will be,” and “was.” (This is how it works in
some Asian languages, such as Chinese.)
Learners of English are lucky in that English conjugation is relatively
simple most of the time. In the present tense, you often add an s (“I eat” versus
“he eats,” “I jog” versus “he jogs”). Unfortunately, for many European
languages this is not the case. The Spanish contar (“to tell”), for instance,
becomes cuento (“I tell”), contamos (“we tell”), and contaste (“you told”),
which are quite different from one another. This conjugation is pretty standard
across Spanish, and the vowel change is easier to get used to than you think,
but if you’re an absolute beginner, it can slow you down.
That’s why I recommend using helper verbs. Just learn the conjugation of a
few verbs and tack on the dictionary form to the end of them. Instead of saying
“I will tell,” which would require you to think of future-tense conjugations,
you can rephrase it as “I want to tell,” as discussed in chapter 5. In Spanish,
you only have to remember that “I want” is quiero, and you very easily get
quiero contar, and can replace any other action word in place of “tell” in the
same way.
With any language, I suggest learning the following modal verbs: