The Preterito Imperfecto (pasado) Tense

The preterito imperfecto is an important and common tense which you should definitely learn.

Yep, it’s time for some technical grammar issues.  There are three basic past tenses in Spanish, preterito perfecto, preterito indefinido, and preterito imperfecto.  That is the order I learned them in too.  To draw a basic English equivalent you might say perfecto = “I have done it”, indefinido = “I did it” and imperfecto = “I was doing it”.  However that comparison is, umm, fairly generalised and not totally correct.

The thing I want to point out today is that preterito imperfecto is actually very important and often used in casual conversation.  I learned these tenses in the order written above and thought the first two forms seemed to cover everything and this third form was just sort of the occassional extra.  However I’ve come to the personal conclusion that you need imperfecto very frequently, for example “I was at the shops, it was really hot and I was in a rush and then someone gave me a leaflet.”  In this sentence everything except the last words would be in the imperfecto form.  When you tell stories, a lot of it uses imperfecto – all the descriptive bits.  So you should put some effort in to learn this tense correctly, and if in doubt about which past tense to use, just use it!

The good news is that it’s easy to learn.  You more or less just add aba to verbs ending in –ar and ia to verbs ending in –ir or –er.  The ir/er forms are identical.  Here’s an example: tenir (to have) = tenia (I had or he/she/it had), tenias (you had).  Trabajar = trabajaba (I worked or he/she/it worked).  I won’t go through all the forms now because there’s plenty of that on the internet and from memory I’ll probably get it wrong anyway.  Now the especially good news with this form is that there are only three irregular verbs, every other verb follows the same pattern (I think they are ser, ver, and ir (??)).  Unlike the preterito indefinido where there are a bunch of irregular forms to master!