Preterite and Imperfect
1. Introduction
Hello there. My name is Darren Churn. I am a Lead Tutor here at UNT’s Learning Center. Today
I am going to be covering the important concepts of the preterite and imperfect tenses. Let’s
begin.
2. New Tenses
The first tense learned in Spanish is the present. The present tense, like it sounds covers actions
that happen in the present such as: “I talk, you walk, he runs, we dance, and they sleep.” As you
know, we use a large variety of tenses in English and the same thing occurs in Spanish. Today
we will be discussing some past tenses and their uses. First, we will cover the preterite tense.
3. Preterite
The preterite tense is a commonly used tense that describe actions that happened in the past. To
get in the mindset, here are some examples of English sentences: “I walked to school. You ate
my lunch. He changed his look. We danced. They called.” Just as we did for regular present
tense verbs, we are going to cover each ending separately, starting with AR verbs.
a. Ar
The endings for AR verbs in the preterite tense are “é, aste, ó, amos, and aron.” These endings
are added add the end of regular verbs the same way they would be done in the present tense. If
we take hablar, we would drop the ar then for the yo form add “é” to form hablé, tú “aste” to
form hablaste, él/ella/usted “ó” to form habló, nosotros add “amos” to form hablamos, and
ellos/ellas ustedes “aron” to form hablaron. Here are some example sentences with ar verbs in
the preterite: “Hablé con mi madre. Nadaron en la piscina.”
b. IR/ER
The endings in the preterite for IR and ER are exactly the same. The endings for ER and IR look
somewhat similar to the endings for AR as well, except there some small differences. The
endings are “í, iste, ió, imos, and ieron.”
4. Irregular Preterite
a. Old stem changers
Stem changers in the preterite work differently than in the present tense. In the present tense, any
stem changing verb was altered in all forms except for the nosotros. In the preterite tense, there
are no stems changed for AR and ER verbs. For IR verbs, the stem is changed only in the
él/ella/usted form and the ellos/ellas/ustedes form. If we remember our common categories of
stem changers we have o->ue, e->ie, and e->i. In the preterite, o->ue will only change from o->u.
And e->ie will only change from e->i. Here are some examples below: “dormir: dormí, dormiste,
durmió, dormimos, durmieron.”
b. New Stem changing Irregulars
In the preterite, there are some stem changers that change more than just the vowel in the middle.
The first category we will talk about are “U” changers. Let’s look at tener. If tener were a regular
ER verb we would simply get “ten-” plus all of the endings. But tener is yet again an irregular.
The stem changes to “tuv-” then we get the following endings: “e, iste, o, imos, ieron.” Another
category of irregular stem changers is the “I” group. There are two main examples of this which
are hacer and querer. For these verbs, we get the new stems of “hic-” and “quis-”. These verbs
will have the same endings as the u group. The last group of irregular stem changers is “J”. Let’s
look at the verb decir. This verb changes to “dij-” with all of the same endings as the previous
two categories except the ellos/ellas/ustedes form is now “eron” instead of “ieron.”
Let’s look at each of these groups side by side with some examples. Our first example comes
from the “U” group and is tener. Tener is conjugated in the preterite as “tuve, tuviste, tuvo,
tuvimos, tivieron”. Our next example is querer which falls under the “I” group. Remember: The
“I” group and the “U” group have the same exact endings. This creates the conjugations of
“quise, quisiste, quiso, quisimos, and quisieron”. Our last example is decir. As part of the “J”
group, the ellos/ellas/ustedes form drops the “i”. We get the conjugations “dije, dijiste, dijo,
dijimos, and dijieron”.
c. Car, gar, zar
In the preterite tense, we now have an “é” at the end of yo form AR verbs. In order to keep the
correct sound of the consonants in certain verbs, the yo form is altered. There are three types of
irregular AR verbs. They are verbs that end in car, gar, and zar. An example of a car verb is
tocar. In order to keep the hard k sound, the ending changes from “c” to “qué”. Only in the yo
form we have a changer that is “toqué”. The rest will be regularly conjugated using the preterite
ar endings. An example of gar is pagar. In order to keep the g sounds, the ending in the yo form
forms “pagué”. For zar, we can look at almorzar. The yo form of this verb is “almorcé.” Yet
again, the rest of the conjugations of this verb are conjugated regularly.
d. Unaccented Verbs
Our last category of irregulars is what I like to call unaccented verbs. These verbs are separated
into their own category because they are simply, different. Our first two verbs that are actually
conjugated the same way are ser and ir. Both of these verbs are conjugated the same way in the
preterite despite having different meanings. The conjugations are fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, and
fueron. Our other two verbs are conjugated as if they are IR verbs but do not have accents. Ver
conjugates to vi, viste, vio, vimos, and vieron. And dar, despite ending in AR, also ends as if it
were an IR verb. It becomes di, diste, dio, dimos, and dieron.
5. Imperfect
Now we are going to go over the imperfect. Without going too in depth into when we use the
imperfect, the basic idea is that it is a used for the past tense for things that were continuous or
reoccurring. Let’s look at the conjugations. Similar to the preterite, the verbs ending in ER and
IR are conjugated the same way. For AR verbs, we use the following endings. Yo, aba. Tú, abas.
Él/ella/usted, aba, nosotros/as, ábamos. and ellos/ellas/ustedes, aban. It is important to note that
there is an accent in the nosotros form. Now let’s move to the ER/IR conjugations. Now we have
Yo, ía. Tú, ías. Él/ella/usted, ía. Nosotros/as, íamos. And ellos/ellas/ustedes, ían. All of these
forms have accents on the “í” but share the same vowel sound of “a” at the end as the AR.
6. Irregular Imperfect
Fortunately, there are no stem changers in the imperfect. In fact, there are only 3 main irregulars.
Ser, ver, and ir. The conjugations for ser are era, eras, era, éramos, eran. The conjugations for ver
are veía, veías, veía, veíamos, veían. And ir are iba, ibas, iba, íbamos, and iban.
7. Preterite vs Imperfect
Now to talk about the differences between preterite and imperfect. Both of these tenses are used
to describe past events, but they are each used in specific situations. The preterite tense is used to
describe past completed actions. Generally this means shorter events. An example of this is “I
played in a baseball game.” This would translate to “Jugué en un partido de béisbol”. This
sentence uses the preterite because the game had a beginning and an end in the past. The
imperfect is used to describe past continuous or habitual actions. If I said “I played baseball
when I was a kid.” I would translate this to “Jugaba béisbol cuando era niño.” Let’s look at this
timeline. This line is time with the end points as the present. If we were to graph the events that
would be described using the preterite. They would be placed like this. All of the points are
distinct, completed events. If we graph the imperfect it would be more fluid and look like this.
The imperfect is continuous in the past.
8. Review
Now with all of the information you have heard today, here is a short review of important things
we covered.
The preterite is used to describe past, completed actions. The regular endings for AR verbs are
“é, aste, ó, amos, and aron.” ER and IR verbs end the same way with “í, iste, ió, imos, and
ieron.” We have 4 main groups of irregular verbs in the preterite as well.
We have our old/vowel stem changers that now only effect IR verbs with O-U or E-I and only in
the third person singular and plural forms. We have our new stem changers that are separated
into the U group, I group, and the J group. We have car, gar, and zar which are AR verbs that
change the yo form only. And we have our unnaccented irregulars which are ser, dar, and ver.
The imperfect is used to describe past continuous or habitual actions. The AR endings are aba,
abas, aba, ábamos, and aban. Both the ER and IR endings are ía, ías, ía, íamos, and ían.
And lastly, the main thing to remember is that the preterite is used to describe more exact
moments in the past and the imperfect describes something that was continuous for a longer
period of time.
9. Closing
Thank you for watching and I hope this helped you get a better idea of the key concepts of
Preterite and Imperfect. Feel free to check out some of our other resources here at the Learning
Center located in Sage Hall room 170.