Spanish has two parallel paradigms for the imperfect subjunctive. One ends in -ra (hablara, comiera, viviera) and is covered in its own page. The other — the subject of this page — ends in -se: hablase, comiese, viviese. The two forms are fully interchangeable in modern peninsular Spanish, and you will encounter the -se form constantly in newspapers, novels, contracts, careful speech, and the everyday conversation of educated speakers. If you have been told the -se form is archaic — perhaps in a Latin-American-oriented textbook — you have been misled. It is alive and well in Spain.
How it is built
The recipe is identical to the -ra form: take the third-person plural preterite of the verb, drop the final -ron, and add the -se set of endings. The only thing that changes is the consonant in the ending: s instead of r.
| Person | hablar (hablaron) | comer (comieron) | vivir (vivieron) |
|---|---|---|---|
| yo | hablase | comiese | viviese |
| tú | hablases | comieses | vivieses |
| él / ella / usted | hablase | comiese | viviese |
| nosotros / nosotras | hablásemos | comiésemos | viviésemos |
| vosotros / vosotras | hablaseis | comieseis | vivieseis |
| ellos / ellas / ustedes | hablasen | comiesen | viviesen |
The accent pattern mirrors the -ra forms: only the nosotros form needs a written accent (hablásemos, comiésemos, viviésemos), because the stress falls three syllables from the end. The vosotros form hablaseis is paroxytone — stress on the -se- syllable (ha-bla-se-is) — with a regular ending in -s, so it takes no written accent. Write hablaseis, not hablaséis.
Where the -se forms come from historically
The two paradigms have entirely separate Latin origins. The -se form descends from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive amavissem, amavisses, amavisset… — which is why every Romance language that still has a synthetic past subjunctive uses something close to it. The -ra form descends from the Latin pluperfect indicative amaveram, amaveras, amaverat… and only later acquired its modern subjunctive value. The two forms competed for centuries, settled into mostly-free variation by the 18th century, and have coexisted ever since. Neither is older than the other in terms of current usage; both are equally standard.
This matters for one practical reason: in Latin-American Spanish, the -se form has been steadily losing ground for over a century, and many Latin-American speakers report finding it bookish or stiff. In Spain, this is not the case. Spanish speakers in Spain use both forms freely, and educated speakers may switch between them within a single paragraph for variety. If you are aiming for peninsular Spanish, learn to produce and recognize both.
Examples across the three core uses
The -se form appears in exactly the same contexts as the -ra form: past triggers, counterfactual si-clauses, and ojalá-wishes.
After a past trigger
Le pedí a mi hermano que me ayudase con la mudanza.
I asked my brother to help me with the move.
La profesora insistió en que entregásemos el trabajo antes del viernes.
The teacher insisted we hand in the assignment before Friday.
No había nadie que conociese el camino mejor que mi abuelo.
There was no one who knew the road better than my grandfather.
In counterfactual si-clauses
Si tuviese tu paciencia, no me enfadaría tanto.
If I had your patience, I wouldn't get so annoyed.
Si pudiésemos cambiar una sola cosa del pasado, ¿qué sería?
If we could change just one thing about the past, what would it be?
After ojalá and after como si
Ojalá lloviese, los campos están secos.
If only it would rain — the fields are dry.
Habla del pueblo como si lo conociese de toda la vida, pero estuvo allí dos días.
He talks about the village as if he'd known it his whole life, but he was there two days.
A peninsular paragraph mixing both forms
To see how natural the alternation is, here is a single paragraph from the register of a Spanish broadsheet column, with both -ra and -se forms appearing without any apparent rule:
Si el Gobierno tuviera la valentía de afrontar la reforma, si fuese capaz de pactar con la oposición antes de que terminase el verano, y si quisiera de verdad que esta legislatura pasase a la historia, todavía habría margen para que llegáramos a un acuerdo.
If the Government had the courage to face the reform, if it were able to reach an agreement with the opposition before the summer ended, and if it really wanted this term to go down in history, there would still be room for us to reach a deal.
A native Spanish journalist alternates tuviera / fuese / terminase / quisiera / pasase / llegáramos in a single sentence and would not even register the switch. You should be able to do the same.
Register: -se versus -ra
The forms are interchangeable, but they are not perfectly identical in feel. A rough rule of thumb for peninsular Spanish:
- -ra is the default in speech. If a Spaniard is chatting and reaches for the imperfect subjunctive, it will probably come out as tuviera, fuera, pudiera.
- -se is more common in writing, especially in journalism, legal language, and literary prose. Tuviese, fuese, pudiese sound a touch more polished — but never stiff.
- Within literature, the choice is almost always stylistic preference. Some Spanish writers (Cela, Mendoza) lean -se; others (Marías) mix freely.
What the -se form is not:
- It is not archaic.
- It is not rare.
- It is not restricted to a particular region of Spain.
- It is not more formal in any official register sense — both forms appear in the BOE (the Spanish official gazette) and in Supreme Court decisions.
One asymmetry: the literary pluperfect use
There is exactly one context in which -ra and -se are not interchangeable. The -ra form retains a vestigial use as a pluperfect indicative (its original Latin meaning), found in newspaper feature writing and 19th-century literature:
El escritor que ganara el premio Cervantes en 1990 falleció ayer.
The writer who had won the Cervantes prize in 1990 passed away yesterday.
Here ganara means había ganado — pluperfect indicative, not subjunctive. The -se form cannot be used this way: El escritor que ganase el premio Cervantes en 1990 falleció would be ungrammatical. See Literary Spanish for more.
This is recognition-only material — never produce it in your own Spanish — but it explains why grammarians sometimes describe -ra as "slightly broader" than -se.
What English does instead
English does not have any equivalent of the -se paradigm — it does not have an equivalent of -ra either, since English has no synthetic past subjunctive at all. We patch over the gap with the simple past ("if I had time"), the bare infinitive ("she wanted me to leave"), or the modal "would." Whichever English construction you would use, you can render it equally well with -ra or -se in Spanish.
Common mistakes
❌ Hablaséis con vuestros padres.
Incorrect — no accent on the vosotros form.
✅ Hablaseis con vuestros padres.
(Subordinate clause: 'que hablaseis con vuestros padres' — that you-all should talk to your parents.)
The vosotros form ends in -seis, a regular paroxytone with a final -s — no written accent. The same trap appears in the -ra form (hablarais, not hablaráis).
❌ Hablasemos en voz baja.
Incorrect — missing accent on nosotros form.
✅ Hablásemos en voz baja.
(Subordinate clause: 'que hablásemos en voz baja' — that we should speak quietly.)
The nosotros form is proparoxytone — three syllables from the end — and always carries an accent. Same for comiésemos, viviésemos, tuviésemos, fuésemos.
❌ Si tendrías más tiempo, podrías acabarlo.
Incorrect — conditional in the si-clause.
✅ Si tuvieses más tiempo, podrías acabarlo.
If you had more time, you could finish it.
Same error as in the -ra page: the si-clause of a counterfactual takes the imperfect subjunctive (either form), never the conditional. Tuvieses works exactly as well as tuvieras here.
❌ No me parece que -se forma se use ya.
Misconception — the -se form is fully in use in Spain.
✅ El uso de la forma en -se sigue plenamente vigente en España.
The -se form is fully current in Spain.
The -se form is not falling out of use in peninsular Spanish. It has lost ground in some Latin-American varieties, but in Spain it is roughly half of all imperfect-subjunctive uses in writing and a quarter in speech, depending on the corpus.
❌ El escritor que ganase el premio Cervantes falleció ayer.
Incorrect — the literary pluperfect use is restricted to -ra forms.
✅ El escritor que ganara el premio Cervantes falleció ayer.
The writer who had won the Cervantes prize passed away yesterday.
The literary pluperfect indicative use belongs to the -ra paradigm only. Don't substitute -se here — it would be ungrammatical even in formal writing. This is, as far as native-speaker intuitions go, the only context where the two forms genuinely diverge.
Key takeaways
- -se endings: -se, -ses, -se, -semos, -seis, -sen.
- Built from the same stem as -ra: 3rd-person plural preterite minus -ron.
- Accent only on the nosotros form: hablásemos, comiésemos, viviésemos.
- Vosotros form hablaseis takes no accent.
- Fully interchangeable with -ra in subjunctive use; somewhat preferred in writing.
- Cannot replace -ra in the literary pluperfect indicative use.
- Not archaic. Not rare. Use it.
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Start learning Spanish→Related Topics
- Imperfecto de subjuntivo en -raB2 — Build the -ra forms of the imperfect subjunctive from the preterite stem and use them in past triggers, counterfactual si-clauses, and ojalá-wishes.
- -ra vs -se: dos formas, un valorB2 — How to choose between -ra and -se in peninsular Spanish — frequency data, register cues, and the one place the two forms genuinely diverge.
- Imperfecto de subjuntivo: verbos irregularesB2 — Every irregular imperfect subjunctive is built from the irregular preterite stem — master ten preterite families and you have the whole system.
- Disparadores en pasado: imperfecto de subjuntivoB2 — When the main clause is past-tense or conditional, subjunctive triggers force the subordinate verb back into the imperfect subjunctive — the sequence-of-tenses rule that drives most uses of -ra and -se.
- Español literarioC1 — The grammar of literary Spanish — hyperbaton and stylistic inversion, the literary -ra pluperfect, archaic connectors (mas, empero, antaño), tense layering and free indirect style, dense subordination, and the lexical archaisms that mark elevated peninsular prose.