You could also talk about things you usually used to do.Įnglish: I usually used to practice my Spanish before lunch.Įspañol: Normalmente practicaba mi español antes de la comida.Įnglish: Did you normally spend a lot of time with your friends from school?Įspañol: ¿Normalmente pasabas mucho tiempo con tus amigos del colegio? This third phrase trigger is again related to the idea of ‘always’ and doesn’t give an indication of start and end moments for the action.Įnglish: I used to do exercise every day.Įnglish: My friends and I used to eat dinner every Friday night in town.Įspañol: Mis amigos y yo cenábamos cada viernes por la noche en el centro. Every day, every week, every month… – Todos los días, todas las semanas… If you wanted to talk about something that ‘always’ used to happen, you will need to use the past imperfect.Įnglish: We always used to watch television after dinner.Įspañol: Siempre veíamos la televisión después de la cena.Įnglish: I always used to go to bed early during the week.Įspañol: Siempre me acostaba temprano entre semana.Ĭlosely related to the first phrase trigger, this time you are talking about things that happened ‘almost always’.Įnglish: They almost always arrived late to work.Įspañol: Ellos casi siempre llegaban tarde al trabajo.Įnglish: She almost always used to call me when I was busy.Įspañol: Ella casi siempre me llamaba cuando estaba ocupada.ģ. For example, ‘we used to go to the swimming pool a lot, not any more’. The other phrase that you could add to the end of almost all of the examples is ‘ ya no‘ which means ‘not now’, ‘no longer’, or ‘not any more’. This will help with the mindset of thinking about events that didn’t start and stop at specific times. So, as you are going through the examples below, think about adding the phrase ‘when I was young…’ or ‘when we were young’. If fact, you’ll often be able to combine phrases like ‘I used to’ and ‘when I was young’ with the phrases below. Similar to the phrases you have seen so far, ‘I used to…’ and ‘when I was young…’, there are many more that we can use to talk about an undefined timeframe in the past. Spanish phrases that trigger the past imperfect tense This means that we should use Spanish past imperfect tense in this context.Īs you will see shortly, the ‘phrase triggers’ below imply an undefined start and end time for a past event, therefore naturally triggering the use of the Spanish past imperfect. It could have been a behaviour that lasted for months, years, or decades. Similarly, if I said ‘I used to shop a lot’, then the question would be when did the shopping habit start and when did it stop?Īll you know from the statement is that the shopping habit occurred for an undefined timeframe. The fact that we don’t know from the information provided in the sentence how long the card games went on means that we need to use the imperfect tense in the Spanish translation. How long did the events in this sentence take place? Did we used to play card games every week for one year or many years? I used to play card games with my grandma when I was young. These arrows signify that events in the past imperfect tense don’t have a well-defined start and end time. Notice the arrows for the imperfect tense. Starting with this graph, you can see the timeframe where each of the three main Spanish past tenses occurs: An overview of the Spanish past imperfect tense #Spanish quotes about endings pdf#Printable Version: Download this PDF version of the 9 Spanish Phrases that Trigger the Past Imperfect Tense to use as a study reference. Here is the first post on phrases that trigger the past simple tense, and the second on phrases that trigger the present perfect tense.Īnd just like the other two, I’m going to start with a quick overview of the Spanish past imperfect. #Spanish quotes about endings series#This is the third article in a series of phrase trigger articles to help distinguish the use of the Spanish past tenses. To help you manage the use of this Spanish past tense, I have put together a list of 9 ‘phrase triggers’, that nearly guarantee the use of this past tense. This is because we can use the past imperfect tense, el pretérito imperfecto in Spanish, for setting the scene, talking about habitual behaviour in the past, for descriptions of things and people, and in combination with the el pretérito indefinido to describe the context for past events. Of the main three Spanish past tenses, the Spanish past imperfect can be the most problematic for Spanish students.
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