I put a shoutout to some of my students recently and I asked them what would help them at the moment with where they’re at with their Spanish. There were quite a few topics that came up so I’m going to start making my way through them starting with this one; the preterit and the imperfect. So, if the difference between the preterit and the imperfect tenses has ever puzzled you, this blogpost is for you.
Many students find this confusing. Questions like “When do you know when to use them?” and “What’s the difference” are common in any language-learning setting. So rather than putting together a mega long lesson I thought a short to the point lesson, highlighting the main ways that you can recognise when something should be in the imperfect and when it should be in the preterit would be beneficial. Here we go.
Preterit Spanish past tense
- Refers to something that started and ended in the past. For example: I ate cake, I swam in the sea, I spoke to my friend.
- Time words;
- Ayer – Yesterday
- La samana pasada – Last week
- El mes pasado – Last month
- El año pasado – Last year
- El jueves pasado – Last Thursday.
- El fin de semana, pasado jugue el hockey. Talking about something that you did in the past on a specific day.
- If you’re talking about a sequence of events that happened in the past, that’s going to be the preterit. ‘First I did this, then I did that, then I did something else’. That’s an action that happened and ended in the past but there were many of them and one happened after the other.
Imperfect Spanish past tense
- Something that was happening in the past: I was eating cake, I was swimming in the sea, I was speaking to my friend.
- Time words;
- Todos las semanas – Every week
- Todos los meses – Every month
- Todos los jueves – Every Thursday
- Los fines de semana – On weekends/ referring to something that you were doing regularly in the past rather than something that you did in the past on a specific day.
- talking about something that you used to do in the past. For example: ‘When I was younger, I used to play hockey’ Cuando era joven, jugaba el hockey.
- You can use the imperfect simultaneously in a sentence. So for example maybe I want to say that I was ‘going for a walk while the birds were singing’. Caminaba por el parque *mientras que los pajaros cantaban.
*Mientras – I was doing something while something else was happening. Allows me to use the imperfect together in the same sentence.
Solving the Spanish grammar problem
The confusion comes when you’re using them both in the same sentence. So, for example, I might want to say that ‘I was cooking tea when the phone rang’. The action of cooking the tea was what I was doing in the past, and the phone rang. The phone ringing interrupted the action that I was doing. So: Cocinaba la cena cuando soño el telefono.
Cocinaba la cena – Imperfect action interrupted by the preterit
Soño – Preterit interrupted the imperfect action
So there we go, a few helpful tips that will help you distinguish a little bit better between when to use the imperfect and the preterit.
Anything else you want to know, ask me and I’ll try my best to answer. In the meantime below you’ll find the link to my YouTube lesson on the difference between imperfect and the preterit.
