Follow on FB. Michelle Margaret Fajkus. Michelle Margaret Fajkus is a bilingual writer and longtime yoga teacher. A former advertising copywriter turned bilingual elementary school teacher, she is now a freelance writer, editor and translator. A native Texan, Michelle has Mexican roots and learned Spanish in middle and high school.
She has become more fluent thanks to living as an expat in Guatemala. She lives with her family on beautiful Lake Atitlan. Latest posts by Michelle Margaret Fajkus see all. Read More. How Are You? Spanish Greetings February 6, You are very helpful in making me understand the spanish language and muchas gracias. Thank you for reading! Have a nice day! Leave a Comment! The preterite is used to describe actions which have been completed.
To form the preterite in Spanish with regular verbs, remove the -ar , -ir , or -er and add the appropriate ending from the chart below.
Adding temporal expressions such as ayer yesterday helps speakers distinguish when something took place. Irregular Preterite Verbs All regular verbs can be transformed into the preterite tense easily.
Irregular verb conjugations take some memorization. However, since learning a new language is no bed of roses, of course there is a catch here. The preterite endings we saw above only apply to the regular verbs, and some of the most commonly used verbs in Spanish take irregular forms.
Therefore, how can you know, for example, the verbs ser, estar, hacer, tener and ver preterite? Since these verbs are used in many day-to-day situations, try to memorize the preterite irregular form of at least the most common ones.
This chart will help you with that:. Last year I had to buy a new car. Estuvimos esperando por ti toda la tarde. We have been waiting for you all afternoon. El cocinero hizo una receta deliciosa. The cooker made a delicious recipe. Ellos quisieron regresar a casa temprano. They wanted to go home earlier. Last Saturday it was released a very good movie.
As we have mentioned before, we use the preterite to talk about an action that happened in a specific time or date in the past. Since these actions already happened and finished, you can say exactly when they have occurred. See how these expressions are used in the sentences below:.
Last week I bought a new computer. Last year we made a trip to Peru. I arrived in the city last month. Hace mucho tiempo que quiero conocerte. I have been wanting to meet you for a very long time. When I was a kid, I had piano classes. Last year it rained very little in Brazil. The imperfect tense in Spanish is used to talk about something that happened not only once but several times.
Unlike the preterite, the imperfect does not care when the action occurred. The important thing is that it happened repeatedly or that it happened during a period of time.
The same way as in the preterite, the regular verbs use the same endings, as you can see in the charts below:. If the verb is regular, you can rely on the two charts above to see its ending in the imperfect tense. How about the irregular tenses?
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