Vosotros: the verb form nobody teaches you, and you'll need it daily in Spain
Vosotros is how you say "you" to more than one person, informally, in Spain. It has its own verb endings — -áis, -éis, -ís — and its own possessive, vuestro. Latin America does not use it, which is why most Spanish courses leave it out. In Spain you will hear it constantly: from friends, from waiters greeting your table, from anyone addressing a group.
The whole thing takes an afternoon to learn and a couple of weeks to stop hesitating over. Here it is.
Why your course skipped it
Spanish courses are commercial products, and the largest market for them is people learning Spanish for the Americas. So the standard curriculum teaches ustedes as the only plural "you" and adds a footnote — "in Spain, vosotros is also used" — somewhere around chapter fourteen.
That footnote does not survive contact with a group of friends in Madrid.
This is the most common gap I see in students who studied Spanish for years before coming here. Their grammar is decent, their vocabulary is fine, and then someone asks the table "¿habéis reservado?" and they freeze on a verb ending they have never produced out loud.
The forms
Vosotros conjugations are the most regular thing in Spanish. Three endings, almost no exceptions.
Present tense — take the infinitive, drop the ending, add:
| Verb type | Ending | Example |
|---|---|---|
| -ar (hablar) | -áis | habláis — you speak |
| -er (comer) | -éis | coméis — you eat |
| -ir (vivir) | -ís | vivís — you live |
That is it. And here is the part that makes it easier than it looks: vosotros barely has irregulars in the present. Verbs that go haywire everywhere else behave themselves here.
- tener → tenéis (not "tienéis" — no stem change)
- poder → podéis
- querer → queréis
- volver → volvéis
The stem-changing verbs that torture you in yo, tú and él forms leave vosotros alone. Only a couple are genuinely irregular:
- ser → sois
- ir → vais
- haber → habéis
Learn those three and you have the present tense.
The other pieces
Possessive: vuestro / vuestra / vuestros / vuestras.
¿Es vuestro coche? — Is that your car? Vuestras maletas están arriba. — Your suitcases are upstairs.
Object pronoun: os.
Os llamo mañana. — I'll call you tomorrow. ¿Os apetece un café? — Do you fancy a coffee?
Commands (informal, plural) — drop the -r of the infinitive and add -d:
hablar → hablad — speak comer → comed — eat venir → venid — come
In practice you will hear the -d dropped constantly in casual speech: venir instead of venid, sentaros instead of sentaos. It is technically non-standard and absolutely everywhere. Do not correct anyone about it.
Past (preterite): -asteis / -isteis.
¿Qué hicisteis ayer? — What did you do yesterday? ¿Comisteis en casa? — Did you eat at home?
When Spaniards switch back to ustedes
Vosotros is the informal plural. Ustedes still exists in Spain, but it is genuinely formal — and Spain is a much less formal country than most people expect.
You will hear ustedes:
- in official settings — a government office, a courtroom, a formal announcement
- from staff in a fairly upmarket restaurant or hotel
- addressing a group of much older strangers
You will not hear it in a normal bar, among colleagues, or from the person selling you a phone contract. If you default to ustedes with everyone the way you might in Bogotá, you will sound oddly ceremonious. Not wrong — just stiff, like someone addressing their friends as "sir".
There is one geographical exception worth knowing: in the Canary Islands and parts of western Andalusia, ustedes is used informally, the way Latin America uses it. If you end up in Cádiz and hear ustedes among friends, that is local, not formal.
Where people actually go wrong
Three mistakes, in order of how often I see them.
1. Mixing vosotros with ustedes verb forms. "¿Ustedes habéis comido?" — pick one. Ustedes takes third-person plural verbs (han comido); vosotros takes its own (habéis comido).
2. Forgetting the possessive. People get habéis right and then say "su coche" instead of "vuestro coche". The possessive has to move with the pronoun.
3. Using les instead of os. "Les llamo mañana" is ustedes. With vosotros it is "os llamo mañana".
None of these will stop you being understood. They just mark you instantly as someone who learned Spanish somewhere else — which is fine, but if you have gone to the trouble of learning the form, you may as well land it.
How to actually get fluent with it
Reading the table is the easy part. Producing it under pressure, in a real conversation, is the bit that takes practice — and it is exactly the practice a textbook cannot give you, because vosotros only appears when you are talking to a group.
The fastest route I know is to force the situation: put yourself in conversations with more than one person, deliberately, until the -áis ending stops requiring a pause. Everything else about vosotros is easier than the grammar you have already survived.
If you are working out which variety of Spanish to learn in the first place, I have written about that here. And if you want the next most common gap, it is the accent marks — small, ignorable-looking, and occasionally meaning-changing.
Want to practise this with someone who corrects you? Spanish Nacho is twelve lessons through Seville — ordering at the bar, haggling in the Triana market, giving directions to the Alcázar — with local characters who answer back and a real teacher reviewing how you are doing. Fourteen days free, no card required. Start free →
Want to practise this with someone who corrects you?
Spanish Nacho is twelve lessons through Seville — ordering at the bar, haggling in the Triana market, giving directions — with characters who answer back and a real teacher reviewing how you are doing. Fourteen days free, no card required.
Start free