Imperativo: visión general

The imperative is how Spanish gives orders, makes requests and offers invitations. Unlike English, where one form (go!) covers everything, Spanish has ten distinct imperatives in everyday peninsular use — five persons (tú, vosotros, usted, ustedes, nosotros), each with an affirmative and a negative form. The good news is that they are not ten unrelated puzzles: there is a single underlying system, and once you see it the whole table snaps into focus.

The whole map in one table

Below is the imperative paradigm for hablar (regular -ar), peninsular usage. Every other verb you will meet follows the same architecture — only the stems and endings change.

The underlying rule

Look at the table above and one fact jumps out: every form in it is the present subjunctive — except for tú and vosotros affirmative. Those two are the only "true" imperative forms in modern Spanish; everything else borrows from the subjunctive.

So the working rule for peninsular Spanish is:

1. Affirmative tú = 3rd-singular present indicative (habla, come, vive).
2. Affirmative vosotros = infinitive with final -r replaced by -d (hablad, comed, vivid).
3. Everything else — usted, ustedes, nosotros affirmative, and every negative imperative regardless of person — uses the present subjunctive.

The peninsular vosotros — Spain's marquee form

The cell that distinguishes peninsular Spanish from the rest of the Spanish-speaking world is the affirmative vosotros imperative — ¡hablad!, ¡comed!, ¡venid!, ¡decid!. In Spain it is the everyday way to give a command to two or more people you treat as familiar: your friends at dinner, your kids in the kitchen, your colleagues you sit with at lunch. A Spaniard saying ¡venid! to a group of friends is doing exactly what an American would do saying come on, you guys.

In Latin America this form does not exist in living speech. Latin Americans use the ustedes form for all plurals, familiar and formal alike: ¡vengan! (come!) is heard whether you are speaking to your children or to a roomful of strangers. A Spaniard who travels to Mexico will be told they sound stiff or biblical if they keep using ¡vosotros!; a Latin American in Spain will sound oddly distant for the opposite reason.

Formation rules in detail

Affirmative tú

Take the 3rd-person singular of the present indicative. For -ar verbs that ends in -a (habla), for -er verbs in -e (come), for -ir verbs in -e as well (vive). Eight common verbs are irregular and use short stems: di, haz, ve, pon, sal, sé, ten, ven. They have their own page.

Affirmative vosotros

Take the infinitive and replace the final -r with -d. Hablar → hablad, comer → comed, vivir → vivid. There are no exceptions: even the eight irregular verbs above behave regularly here (decir → decid, hacer → haced, ir → id, poner → poned, salir → salid, ser → sed, tener → tened, venir → venid).

When the verb is reflexive, the final -d drops before -os: levantar → levantaos, sentar → sentaos, vestir → vestíos. The single exception is irse, which keeps the -d: idos — though colloquial Spain very widely says iros instead.

Affirmative usted, ustedes, nosotros

Take the present subjunctive of the matching person: hable, hablen, hablemos. That's the entire rule.

Negative imperatives (every person)

Put no before the corresponding present-subjunctive form. No hables, no habléis, no hable, no hablen, no hablemos. The affirmative tú and vosotros forms (habla, hablad) are not used in the negative — that would produce ungrammatical sentences.

This is the source of one of the most common beginner errors: no habla is not Spanish for "don't speak (to one friend)". The correct form is no hables, because the negative tú imperative uses the tú present subjunctive.

Pronoun placement — the two rules

Pronouns (reflexive, direct object, indirect object) behave in opposite ways depending on whether the imperative is affirmative or negative.

• Affirmative imperative: pronouns attach to the end as a single written word, with an accent added to preserve stress. Dímelo, háblales, cómprate, sentaos.
• Negative imperative: pronouns precede the verb as separate words, just as in the indicative. No me lo digas, no les hables, no te lo compres, no os sentéis.

The accent on cuéntamelo is obligatory: without it the stress would shift and the word would be misread.

How register maps to which form you choose

The choice between tú/vosotros and usted/ustedes is not just grammatical — it is a social decision Spaniards make many times a day.

• tú / vosotros: anyone you would address by first name. Friends, family, peers at work, shop assistants your own age, anyone under about thirty in casual contexts. In modern peninsular Spanish tú is the default; usted sounds notably formal to most under-50s.
• usted / ustedes: institutional contexts (banks, courts, hospitals when speaking to a doctor for the first time), older strangers, customer-service when the company sets the register, written letters with a formal tone. Andalusian and Canarian speakers use ustedes more freely than the rest of peninsular Spain.
• nosotros: the let's… form. Often replaced in conversational Spain by vamos a + infinitive (vamos a comer "let's eat") rather than the synthetic comamos, which sounds slightly elevated. Vámonos (let's go) is the major exception — universal in speech.

Reflexive verbs in the imperative

Reflexive imperatives produce some of the trickiest spellings in the entire paradigm. Here is levantarse across all five persons:

The vosotros dropped-d (levantaos, not levantados) and the nosotros dropped-s (levantémonos, not levantémosnos) are spelling rules driven by pronunciation — Spanish dislikes the consonant clusters that would result.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• The imperative paradigm is best learned as a single ten-cell table, not as five unrelated rules.
• Tú and vosotros affirmative are the only "real" imperative forms; every other cell — including all negatives — uses the present subjunctive.
• The peninsular vosotros affirmative (¡hablad!, ¡venid!) is the headline form of Spain and disappears completely in Latin America, replaced by ustedes (¡hablen!, ¡vengan!).
• Pronoun placement is the opposite for affirmative and negative imperatives: attached vs preceding. The mismatch is the single biggest source of beginner mistakes.