The Imperfect Tense (Regular Verbs)

Spanish: El Pretérito Imperfecto (Verbos Regulares)

Level: A2 Elementary

Category: verbs

Explanation

The imperfect tense is a past tense used to describe habitual or repeated actions, descriptions, and situations that lasted over time. Unlike the preterite (which describes completed, one-time actions), the imperfect describes how things were or what we used to do regularly. For example: "When I was a child, I used to play in the park every day." To form the imperfect of regular verbs, we remove the infinitive ending (-ar, -er, -ir) and add the corresponding endings. Verbs ending in -ar have one set of endings (-aba, -abas, -aba, -ábamos, -abais, -aban), while verbs ending in -er and -ir share the same set (-ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos, -íais, -ían). We use the imperfect for: habitual actions in the past ("We always used to eat at two"), descriptions of people, places, or things in the past ("The house was big"), telling time and age in the past ("It was three o'clock", "I was ten years old"), and ongoing actions interrupted by another action ("I was reading when you arrived"). An important feature: in the imperfect, the first person (yo) and the third person (él/ella/usted) have the same form. Context or the pronoun helps us tell who is performing the action.

Examples

• Cuando era niño, tomaba chocolate caliente en este café. - When I was a child, I used to drink hot chocolate at this café.
• Antes el camarero nos hablaba siempre en español. - Before, the waiter always used to speak to us in Spanish.
• De pequeña, mi abuela vivía cerca del mercado. - As a little girl, my grandmother used to live near the market.
• Todos los veranos visitábamos el museo del Prado. - Every summer we used to visit the Prado museum.
• El hotel era muy tranquilo y la habitación tenía vistas al parque. - The hotel was very quiet and the room had views of the park.