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Cite this Article Format. Erichsen, Gerald. The Imperfect Tense in Spanish. What Is the Preterite Tense in Spanish? Preferir Conjugation in Spanish, Translation, and Examples. Here are the imperfect tense conjugations of jugar to play with the pattern highlighted, so you can see this in action:.
The only exceptions are three little bad boys that decided to be irregular verbs. But even though these verbs are irregular, they follow a certain pattern! I always say they are irregularly regular. Ser uses the same endings as regular verbs but without the -ab-.
Ir does the same but only drops the -a -. Finally, ver … Oh, question! Why is ver considered irregular if it has the regular endings it is supposed to have?
Just as the English present simple is associated with time expressions such as never, always, often, sometimes, etc. The next list includes some of these expressions. I have added a translation and a couple of examples for each expression so that you can see everything in context:.
She would cry every day. She wrote to me from time to time. I met up with her from time to time until I turned We used to see each other frequently during summer. I used to eat a lot more during that time.
At that time, none of us had a computer. They usually went to the beach in the morning. Generalmente sacabas mejores notas que yo. You usually got better grades than me. I would often eat pizza when I was living in Spain. We would often go fishing when we were on holiday.
Muchas veces trabajaba los fines de semana. Many times I would work on weekends. Pedro used to sing the same song many times. Ellos nunca jugaban en el parque. The would never play in the park. We always used to eat ice cream on Fridays. When I was a child I always wanted to be an astronaut. We have covered the imperfect tense conjugation, the regular and irregular verbs and the expressions associated with the Spanish imperfect tense.
The last stop in our journey is getting to know the different uses this tense has in the Spanish language. This verb pretty much adopts the -ar endings except the first a is an i. This one is barely irregular! And there you have it! Just three irregular verbs. Ser, ir, and ver are used often so be sure to study them. There are a variety of ways to translate the imperfect tense in Spanish into English.
So how do you know which one is right? With so many options, how do I choose? Do I even have to choose? As language learners, we need to avoid the fallacy of translating everything into our native language. Instead, we should look at the meaning of the imperfect tense in Spanish and the situations in which it is used.
In all of these possible English sentences, what is the message? The message is that walking to school is a past action with no specified time or frequency, and that the act of walking is a continuous action that may be habitual. It could be setting the scene for something more definitive. When describing a person, place or thing in the past, it is hard to define a specific time frame.
When you say that a person was tall, when did they start being tall? Did they stop being tall? A characteristic or description is continuous and therefore should be in the imperfect. Read on for more about these uses of the imperfect. Habitual or repeated actions are those that were done over and over in the past. These are often things a person used to or would do. It's quite common to see the imperfect used to talk about something that was happening when something else occurred.
It's also used for actions that continued in the past for an unspecified period of time. When talking about a past action in progress that was interrupted, the action in progress is in the imperfect, while the interrupting action is in the preterite. For more on the differences between the preterite and the imperfect, check out this article! The imperfect is used to give descriptions in the past, especially those that set the scene in terms of the senses.
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