Lesson 18: Introducing the Imperfect Tense

18.1

Why Another Past Tense?

You’ve already tackled one past tense in Spanish: the preterite. But there’s another important one you need to know—the imperfect!

The imperfect is your go-to tense for providing background details, describing ongoing past actions, or recounting habitual activities. It’s often used to talk about age, health, or emotions in past contexts. It’s also ideal for describing repetitive actions from your childhood—like doing your homework every night (you definitely did that, right?). While the preterite drives the plot forward with specific actions and events, the imperfect creates the backdrop, setting the scene and adding depth to your story.
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Here’s a quick example where the first verb is imperfect and the second is in the preterite:

In this example, the preterite highlights the specific action—the alien landing in my yard. It’s the main event, moving the story forward. Meanwhile, the imperfect sets the scene with me eating my burrito, presenting it as an ongoing background action rather than a key plot point.

18.2

Formation of the Imperfect

Here are the regular verb endings. You’re so far down the road to becoming a VerbMaster that you don’t need much more intro than that:

What do you notice about the regular verb forms? Hopefully a couple things. First, the ‑ER and ‑IR endings are the same and second, those all carry accents in all forms, as does the nosotros form of the ‑AR verbs.

18.3

Regular Verbs in the Imperfect

Again, we'll just break off the stem and add the corresponding endings to HABL+, COM+, VIV+.

18.4

Using the Imperfect

We have come up with some helpful instances below of when you should be using the imperfect tense as opposed to another past tense. You should use the imperfect tense when you are doing any of the following.
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Describing or giving information in these categories:

Providing background information such as:

Describing an ongoing state:

El niño estaba muy feliz el día de su cumpleaños.

The boy was very happy on his birthday.

Narrating an ongoing action/event or multiple simultaneous ongoing events:

Cuando yo vivía en Argentina, trabajaba como payaso.‍

When I used to live in Argentina, I used to work as a clown.

Narrating a repeated or repetitive action/event without specifying an end or number of repetitions:

Comías muchas empanadas cuando eras joven.

You ate lots of empanadas when you were young.

Setting the scene (but then the preterite interrupts!):

Él hablaba con la dentista, pero ella le pidió que se detuviera.

He was speaking with the dentist, but she asked him to stop.

Duration without a clearly indicated endpoint or timeline:

Esperaba horas en la oficina antes de ver al doctor.

I was waiting for hours in the office before seeing the doctor.