Verbal Periphrases

A Spanish tense pins down when; a verbal periphrasis adds how it unfolds. The recipe is always the same: a helper verb (the auxiliary), sometimes a small linking word, and a non-finite main verb - an infinitive, a gerund (-ando / -iendo) or a participle (-ado / -ido). Only the helper is conjugated; the main verb stays fixed.

• Acabo de llegar. (I have just arrived.)
• Llevo dos horas esperando. (I have been waiting for two hours.)
• Volvió a llamar. (He called again.)

English does this job with a jumble of adverbs, phrasal verbs and the perfect. Spanish packages it into a tidy set you can group by meaning.

The map: grouped by what they add

Notice the pattern in the linking word: starting and finishing ideas lean on a or de plus an infinitive, while continuing, lasting and gradual ideas take a gerund with no preposition.

Starting: ponerse a, echarse a, empezar a

These mark the moment an action kicks off. The neutral pair is empezar a and comenzar a:

• Empezó a llover. (It started to rain.)
• Comenzamos a estudiar a las ocho. (We started studying at eight.)

For a sudden, emotional start, Spanish reaches for ponerse a and echarse a - closer to the English "burst into" or "set about":

• Se puso a llorar. (He burst into tears.) - abruptly, all at once.
• Se echó a reír. (She burst out laughing.)
• Me puse a trabajar en cuanto llegué. (I set to work the moment I arrived.)

Echarse a loves verbs of sudden motion or emotion (llorar, reír, correr); ponerse a is the broader "get down to doing".

Continuing: seguir, continuar, andar + gerund

These say the action is still going. The workhorse is seguir + gerund:

• Sigue lloviendo. (It is still raining. / It keeps raining.)
• Seguimos esperando. (We are still waiting.)

Continuar is a slightly more formal twin - continúa lloviendo - and andar + gerund adds a note of "going around / busily doing", often with a hint of disapproval:

• Anda diciendo que no fue culpa suya. (He goes around saying it was not his fault.)

Remember these take the gerund, never an infinitive: sigue lloviendo, not "sigue a llover".

Lasting: llevar for "have been -ing for"

This is the one every learner wants. To say how long an action has been running, use llevar plus a time expression plus a gerund:

• Llevo dos horas esperando. (I have been waiting for two hours.)
• Llevamos un año viviendo aquí. (We have been living here for a year.)

The trap for English speakers is the tense: Spanish keeps llevar in the present, because the waiting is still happening now, where English switches to a perfect ("have been"). Do not say "he estado esperando dos horas" as a default - llevo dos horas esperando is the idiomatic choice.

A close variant swaps the gerund for sin + infinitive to say how long you have gone without doing something:

• Llevo tres días sin dormir. (I have not slept for three days.)
• Lleva meses sin llamarme. (He has not called me in months.)

Finishing: acabar de, dejar de, llegar a

The star here is acabar de + infinitive, the Spanish for "have just":

• Acabo de llegar. (I have just arrived.)
• Acaba de salir. (She has just left.)

Keep it in the present for "have just" and the imperfect for "had just": acababa de comer (I had just eaten). Beware the false friend: acabar without de means simply to finish, so acabo de comer is "I have just eaten", while termino de comer leans towards finishing the meal itself.

Dejar de + infinitive means to stop doing something:

• Dejó de fumar. (He stopped smoking.)
• No dejes de escribirme. (Do not stop writing to me.)

Llegar a + infinitive means to manage to or go so far as to:

• Llegó a ser director. (He went on to become director.)
• No llegué a entenderlo. (I never quite managed to understand it.)

Repeating: volver a for "re-"

Volver a + infinitive is the neatest trick in the set: it is the Spanish equivalent of the English prefix "re-" or the adverb "again":

• Volvió a llamar. (He called again.)
• Vuelve a leerlo. (Read it again.)
• No lo volveré a hacer. (I will not do it again.)

Where English has a dedicated re- verb, Spanish often just uses volver a: volver a escribir (to rewrite), volver a nacer (to be reborn).

Gradual: ir + gerund

Ir + gerund paints an action as unfolding little by little:

• Va mejorando. (It is gradually getting better.)
• Voy entendiendo el problema. (I am slowly getting to grips with the problem.)
• Las cosas van cambiando. (Things are gradually changing.)

The sense is progressive change over time, not a snapshot of right now - that snapshot job belongs to estar + gerundio.

The obligation periphrases, in brief

A whole family of periphrases expresses having to do something. They have their own page, so here is just the roll-call: tener que + infinitive (personal obligation - tengo que irme), hay que + infinitive (impersonal necessity - hay que estudiar), and deber + infinitive (duty or strong advice - debes descansar). See obligation and necessity for the full treatment.

Common mistakes English speakers make

Dropping or swapping the linking word. Each periphrasis fixes its own preposition: empezar a, acabar de, dejar de. "Empezar de" and "acabar a" are both wrong. Learn the little word as part of the phrase.

Using a gerund where an infinitive belongs (and back). Starting and finishing periphrases take an infinitive (volvió a llamar, not "volvió a llamando"); continuing and lasting ones take a gerund (sigue lloviendo, not "sigue a llover").

Putting llevar in the perfect. For "I have been waiting two hours", Spanish keeps llevar in the present: llevo dos horas esperando, not a perfect-tense calque of the English.

Confusing acabar de with acabar. Acabo de comer is "I have just eaten"; acabo de trabajar is "I have just finished working", but acabo el trabajo (no de) is "I finish the work". The de is what delivers "have just".

Learn the periphrases by the nuance they add, keep the linking word attached, and you gain a whole layer of meaning Spanish tenses alone cannot express.

See also

• The present progressive - estar + gerundio for the here-and-now, and why it is not the English -ing.
• hace and desde - the other ways Spanish measures ongoing time, alongside llevar.
• Obligation and necessity - tener que, hay que and deber in full.
• The Spanish grammar cheatsheet collects the periphrasis groups on one card.