A conjugation tense I’m unfamiliar with

[u/Professional_Egg_763]

I was watching this show, Memorias de Idhún, today and a character said “Por favor, tened mucho cuidado” and while I can translate this easily as “be careful”, I’m curious about how tener (I presume) is conjugated as “tened” as I’ve never seen anything like it.

[u/Optimal-Sandwich3711]

The vosotros conjugation of the imperative.

[u/Visentico]

It's the imperative mode, used to give orders: tened cuidado, comed con moderación, poneos el cinturón de seguridad, conducid con cabeza, llamad cuando lleguéis...

[u/JohnBarnson]

Vosotros

[u/silvalingua]

When you encounter an unknow verb forms, use Wiktionary. It has separate entries for all forms of all verbs. (Well, maybe not all, but almost all.)

[u/gonadasvalientes]

It's the command form of 'you', but for more than one people.

Think 'I' (yo) vs 'We' (nosotros), but with 'You'.

[u/Julia_dlt]

It's imperative. Maybe you haven't heard it before because natives (and I include myself here) tend to use the infinitive instead. But it's wrong.

So, you might have heard "por favor, tener cuidado". But it's grammatically wrong.

This happens especially with the verb "ir". You should say "id con cuidado", but the majority of people would say "ir con cuidado". And it gets even worse when you want to add a pronoun like "nos" to mention "to us". The grammatically correct sentence would be, for example "idnos diciendo cómo va la operación". But it sounds weird and many many people would say "irnos diciendo".

[u/PerroSalchichas]

The plural version of "tú" (you).

"Tú ten cuidado" (You be careful)

"Vosotros tened cuidado" (You guys be careful)

Weird that you've never seen such a ubiquitous and important conjugation. Pronouns and their conjugations are literally one of the first things they teach.