In Spanish, there are a few ways to talk about things that happened in the past; these different ways are expressed in different verb tenses, with different endings. In this section, you will learn a verb tense called el pretérito, or “the preterite,” which will be the first verb tense you learn in order to talk about the past. Later on in this course, you will learn more ways to communicate actions in the past, and how they are used in comparison to the preterite. For the moment, however, we are going to focus on the preterite—how it is conjugated, and how it is used. First, we will look at how you form the preterite of regular verbs.
In order to form the preterite tense of regular verbs, you will first take the –ar, –er, or –ir ending off of the infinitive, and then add the appropriate endings. In the tables below, you will see an –ar, –er, and –ir verb.
| bailar – to dance (pretérito) | ||||||||||||
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| comer – to eat (pretérito) | ||||||||||||
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| recibir – to receive (pretérito) | ||||||||||||
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The endings for the regular –er and –ir verbs are exactly the same. Both the first and third person singular forms of –ar, –er, and –ir verbs all have an accent mark. It is crucial that you remember to put the accent mark. If you do not, then you are not actually conjugating in the preterite. In other words, without the accent mark, your verb will be wrong!
Now, let’s discuss how we use this verb tense to talk about actions in the past. When you use this verb tense, you are communicating an action that happened in the past that is completely over and done with. This may be just one action, or it may be several in sequence. With the preterite, you are expressing the idea that the action you are talking about has a fixed beginning point and a concrete end point. If you can consider the action that you are talking about as having a definite end, and having taken place within a concrete block of time—one in which you can clearly identify the start and the finish—then you will use the preterite.
To make this a little more clear, let’s consider some examples in English that would require the use of the preterite in Spanish. For example, if someone asks you what you did yesterday, and you answer “I got up at 8 a.m. Then, I took a shower and drank a cup of coffee. At 9 a.m., I went to school. I went to four classes and then, I ate lunch with a friend.” These actions are all over and done with and did not go on for a long, drawn-out, indefinite period of time. Rather, they happened in a concrete block of time and have a clear and definite end point. Thus, in Spanish, these are all actions that you would express with the preterite tense. Below, you can look at several examples in Spanish to get a better idea of how this tense is used.
 El lunes pasado Teresa terminó su tesis. |
Foto: Pete Hopkins CC BY-SA 2.0 |
| Anoche me acosté a las once. |
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| Anteayer él comió comida china por primera vez. |
Foto: David Prieto CC BY-SA 2.0 |
| La semana pasada nosotros compramos un coche. |
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| Esta mañana ella salió para San José. |
Foto: Cristian Borquez CC BY 2.0 |
| Ayer Mónica habló con su novio. |
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| Rosa y Pepe escribieron una carta a su abuela. |
Foto: Donna Benjamin CC BY-SA 2.0 |
| Hoy nosotros nos levantamos a las seis. |
The preterite is often accompanied by an expression of time that locates it in the past, such as “yesterday” or “last weekend.” These types of expressions will help you to recognize when to use the preterite, as they are the first step in identifying a concrete period of time. Most importantly however, when you are talking about an event in the past, ask yourself if you can clearly view the action as having a fixed beginning and end. If you can, then you will want to use the preterite.
Here, you can listen to Claudia tell you about the day she had yesterday in order to see how the preterite is used to narrate a sequence of events in the past.
Candela Citations
- Lesson 10: Estructuras gramaticales . Authored by: Open Learning Initiative. Provided by: Carnegie Mellon. Located at: https://oli.cmu.edu/jcourse/lms/students/syllabus.do?section=037856eb80020ca6007833f93f06cd13. Project: Spanish1. License: CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
