(yo) caminaba Person Verbs ending in -ar Verbs ending in -er and -ir yo -aba -ía tú -abas -ías él, ella, usted -aba -ía nosotros -ábamos -íamos vosotros -abais -íais ellos, ellas, ustedes -aban -ían Irregular Verbs in the Imperfect Tense Then, add the appropriate ending from the chart below, depending on who is performing the action.ģ. To conjugate a verb in the imperfect tense, remove the -ar/-er/-ir so that you’re left with the stem of the infinitive. Spanish verbs come in three categories – -ar, -ir, and - er – and change (conjugate) according to who performed it and when the action occurred.
Imperfect endings how to#
English Spanish always siempre sometimes a veces, de vez en cuando often/frequently frecuentemente, a menudo every day cada día, todos los días every year cada año How to Form the Imperfect Tense If you see or are tempted to use any of these phrases when talking about the past, especially in descriptive, non-specific contexts, it’s a tip-off that you should use the imperfect. I was building a house when my phone fell off the roof (interrupted event). I built a house last year (event is completed).Ĭonstruía una casa cuando mi teléfono se cayó del techo. If you were to draw the following two sentences on a timeline, you would have difficulty pinpointing where the sentence using imperfect starts and ends, as the speaker does not specify the exact duration.Ĭonstruí una casa el año pasado. In English, we often use “used to” to denote that an action was ongoing for an indeterminate amount of time or habitual. La ciudad era más pequeña cuando era joven. Attributes or general descriptions of the past While she was eating dinner, I was calling my mother.ĥ. Two simultaneous events taking place at a non-specific point in the past It was the first of January and I was making my New Year’s resolutions.Ĥ. When I lived in Germany, I was always very cold.Įra el primero de enero y estaba escribiendo mis propósitos de año nuevo. Feelings, emotions, mental actions, or physical sensationsĬuando vivía en Alemania, pasaba mucho frío. While the imperfect tense has the meaning of “I used to” implicitly, it can also be made more explicit with the verb soler in the imperfect, which means that you usually tended to do something.Ģ.
I would walk by the park every day on my way home. Actions that were habitual or happened frequently in the pastĬaminaba por el parque todos los días camino a casa. However, there are also a few other times that the imperfect is used.ġ. The easiest question to ask yourself is whether the action has a definitive completion time or not. The imperfect tense is one of the easiest tenses to conjugate the difficulty lies in deciding when to use it or the Spanish preterite. For hands-on practice using the imperfect, sign up for Lingvist’s online Spanish course.įind out how When to use the imperfect tense This guide will give lots of examples of the different types of situations that require the imperfect tense in Spanish.
Naturally, we express the same types of events in English, so the trick is to start to separate the meanings expressed into two buckets. The distinction isn’t made as clearly in English, so you’ll find yourself at a crossroads when describing the past: preterite or imperfect? Sure, it is easy to sail through activities where you’re asked to conjugate the imperfect, and you only have to memorize three irregular verbs! However, it’s very common for English speakers to default to the preterite when describing events in the past, rather than using both appropriately. If you’re like me, you learned the difference between imperfecto and pretérito perfecto in Spanish class and thought: emotions and sentences where I would use “used to.” ¡Fácil!īut there’s a lot more subtlety to using the imperfecto than that. Though there are several past tense options in Spanish, the imperfect is one of the two most commonly used past tenses in the language. The Spanish imperfect tense is generally used for descriptions of past events or actions without a specific endpoint in time.
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