SPN2345-ABED_1: 4.3 - Estructuras - imperativo: usted

In day-to-day life it’s common to ask people to do things. When we say “do this”, “pick up the garbage”, or “start now” - these are commands. Right now, we are going to look at los mandatos formales - these are commands that we use for people that we don’t know, or want to show respect to (that means we use usted and ustedes, remember!).

We are going to work with both los mandatos afirmativos (affirmative - we want the person/people to do it) and los mandatos negativos (negative - we don’t want the person/people to do it).

Usted commands:

Let’s look at an example, you want someone to dribble a ball.

Start with the verb in the sentence: “to dribble”, in Spanish: driblar
Use the yo form of the verb: driblar→ driblo
Drop the ending (-o): driblo → dribl
Add -e for “-ar” verbs and add -a for “-er/-ir” verbs: drible

Drible el balón.

To form an usted command:

1st person singular verb (yo) in present tense, with changed ending to -e (-ar verbs) or -a (-er/-ir verbs)

How would you tell someone to run faster?

Verb in the sentence: “to run”, in Spanish: correr
Yo form: correr → corro
Drop ending: corr
Add -a for “-er” verb: corra

¡Emilio, corra rápido y drible el balón!

How would you tell a person to score a goal?

Verb in the sentence “to score”, in Spanish: meter
Yo form: meter → meto
Drop ending: met
Add -a for “-er” verb: meta

¡Meta un gol!

Ustedes commands:

To form plural (ustedes) commands, when we are talking to more than one person, we follow the same steps as for usted, but we change the endings slightly:

1st person singular verb (yo) in present tense, with changed ending to -en (-ar verbs) or -an (-er/-ir verbs)

How would you ask a group of children to wait?

Verb in the sentence: “to wait”, in Spanish: esperar
Yo form: esperar → espero
Drop ending: esper
Add -en for “-ar” verb: esperen

Niños, ¡esperen!

Now, tell the children to run.

¡Niños corran a la escuela que van a llegar tarde!

Usted/Ustedes commands - con los verbos “yo-go”:
Remember - because we learned to use the yo form as the base/stem for forming our commands, these ones are easy! Do you remember the meanings of them in English? Complete the following table and save it in your notes. Use the first verb “tener” as an example.

	Meaning	Usted	Ustedes
tener	to have	tenga	tengan
traer
venir
salir
hacer
poner
decir
oir

Ustedes commands: con verbos que tienen cambio de raíz:

Do you remember some verbs that we have looked at that have a stem-change? Like the verb dormir → duermo? We have to remember these stem-changes in our commands - this is why we learned to use the the yo form as our base/stem. The following chart has some examples of stem-changing verbs we have seen and what their command forms are.

o:ue			e:ie
dormir	to sleep	duerma/n	cerrar	to close	cierre/n
mover	to move	mueva/n	pensar	to think	piense/n
contar	to count	cuente/n
volver	to return	vuelva/n
encontrar	to find	encuentre/n
recordar	to remember	recuerde/n