Learn Spanish online.

I dont understand how to use imperfect and preterit verbs in spanish can someone thoroughly explain?

Posted by Gary Frazier
May 04 2010

I am doing spanish 2 online and the lesson teaching when to use preterit and imperfect verbs is not clear. Like I am asked to write a sentence saying what food I used to not like but now i like. Please many examples of usage would be helpful

Im still trying to master this too. I will add your question to my watchlist so i can read about what answers we got later on or tommarrow.
One tip though is you can go to www.youtube.com and do a search on imperfect and preterit and some people will explain it on youtube.
If you have a computer at home just keep playing it and maybe you will get it down.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • TwitThis
  • Live
  • LinkedIn
  • Pownce
  • MySpace

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

2 Responses

  1. Antonio says:

    Im still trying to master this too. I will add your question to my watchlist so i can read about what answers we got later on or tommarrow.
    One tip though is you can go to http://www.youtube.com and do a search on imperfect and preterit and some people will explain it on youtube.
    If you have a computer at home just keep playing it and maybe you will get it down.
    References :

  2. TheChristianJew says:

    Okay, so you would use imperfect for something that was going on, or went over a period of time.
    Examples:
    I lived in California.
    We were eating dinner.
    I was running to the store.
    Preterite is used when something happens at a specific time, or ends at a specific time.
    Examples:
    We moved to California on October 20th.
    We ate dinner at 6:30.
    I went to the store.
    If you said these sentences, you would use verbs in these spots:
    I was walking (imperfect) to school, when aliens abducted (preterite) me.
    We were swimming (imperfect), and then a shark ate (pretirite) timmy.
    I was riding my bike (imperfect), when the car hit (preterite) me.

    Usually imperfect is used to give a background of what was going on when something else happened, where you use preterite.

    Hope this helps :)
    References :

Security Code:

Trackback URL for this entry