Spanish commands: haz, di, ve and no digas

How do you make a command in Spanish?

The tú command of a regular verb is the él form of the present: habla, come, vive. The sentence tells them apart — Marta habla inglés is a statement, ¡Habla más alto! a command — and stem-changing verbs keep their change: piensa, vuelve, pide.

Usted and ustedes borrow the present subjunctive: hable, coma, viva; hablen, coman, vivan. That is why an -ar verb's usted command ends in -e and an -er or -ir verb's in -a — the endings swap. Vosotros, the plural you of Spain, turns the infinitive's -r into -d: hablad, comed, vivid.

Vos — the informal you of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and much of Central America — takes the vosotros form without its -d, stressed on the end: hablá, comé, viví. It has no stem change: pensá, volvé, pedí.

Which tú commands are irregular in Spanish?

These eight are the whole list, and they are among the verbs used most. Four are the infinitive with its ending cut off — pon, sal, ten, ven — decir and hacer shorten to di and haz, and ir and ser have forms of their own: ve, sé.

Vosotros needs no list of its own: all eight follow its -d rule — decid, haced, id, poned, salid, sed, tened, venid.

Their compounds follow them, with an accent where the stress lands on a final -n: supón, mantén, deshaz. The compounds of decir are the exception — their tú command is regular: predice, contradice, bendice.

Sé is ser's command — sé paciente, sé bueno — and it keeps its accent, which tells it from the pronoun se; the same written sé is also yo sé, from saber. Ve is ir's — ve a casa — and the RAE's usage guide calls ves, heard for it, a vulgarism. With vos, ir's command is andá, from andar.

How do you make a negative command in Spanish?

Put no in front and the verb switches to the present subjunctive, for everyone: no hables, no habléis, no hable, no hablen. A yes form never follows no — so di becomes no digas, haz no hagas, ve no vayas, sé no seas.

Usted and ustedes were already on the subjunctive, so for them only the no is new: hable, no hable; digan, no digan. Vos uses the subjunctive too — no digas, no hagas — and in Argentina no digás and no hagás are also heard; for educated River Plate Spanish, the RAE's usage guide prefers hagas to hagás.

Where do the pronouns go in a Spanish command?

In a yes command the pronouns attach to the end of the verb, the indirect one first: dime, dímelo, cómpraselo. After no they go in front, in the same order: no me lo digas, no se lo compres.

The stress stays where it was, and the written accent follows the ordinary rules. Di + me is dime — two syllables ending in a vowel, no accent — but di + me + lo is dímelo, stressed three syllables from the end, so it takes one, like cómpralo, dígame and cuéntame. Dé drops its accent when a pronoun joins it: deme, dele, deles.

Vos keeps the stress on the end, so one pronoun takes the accent away and two bring it back: decime, andate, ponelos; decímelo, ponételo — the examples the RAE's usage guide gives.

Before os the vosotros form drops its -d: sentad + os is sentaos, salid + os salíos. Irse traditionally keeps it — idos — and iros, now the most common form in speech, is accepted too; the RAE's usage guide says to avoid the archaic íos.

Why do English speakers get Spanish commands wrong?

English has one command for everyone — tell me, don't tell me — so three things are new at once: the form changes with who you are talking to, no switches it to the subjunctive, and the pronouns move. The usual slips are the regular form where a short one belongs (hace for haz, dice for di), a yes form after no (no di, no ve), the pronoun left on the end after no (no envíala), and the accent a pronoun brings, missed or misplaced (dimelo, déme).

Our mistake corpus does not tag commands yet, so there is no rate for commands alone — the quiz above is the measure. It does count the present subjunctive that every negative command and every usted command is built on: across 45 learners and 182 present-subjunctive forms in conversation and writing (recounted 24 September 2026), 66% were wrong — the hardest point we measure. By level: A2 71%, B2 60%, C1 55%. The count covers every use of the subjunctive, not commands alone, and it is a count of our own learners, not a study.

What comes after Spanish commands?

The present subjunctive is the mood every negative command and every usted command borrows — the same forms after que: quiero que vengas, no quiero que digas nada. Tú vs usted decides which command to use, and it sets the vos forms beside tú's. Double object pronouns are the me lo and se lo that join the end of a yes command — dímelo, dáselo — and lo, la or le is which pronoun to attach. Stem-changing verbs keep their change in the tú command: piensa, vuelve, pide. Reflexive verbs lose a letter before nos and os: levantémonos, sentaos. The free Spanish level test places you on the A1–C2 scale in five minutes, and how to go from A1 to A2 in Spanish is a weekly plan for the first step up.