Kilo Lingo

Ch 1 · Lesson 8

Preterite vs imperfect

Grammar for AP Spanish.

The short version

Imperfect sets the stage, preterite lands the event

, .

While I was talking with my mother, the phone rang.
Why?

The bedrock structure of Spanish narration is an ongoing action in the imperfect cut across by an event in the preterite. , María : one arrival, one sleep already in progress. Get this composite right and most of the tense choice in a story looks after itself.

is met, not knew

2010.

I met my wife in 2010.
Why?

A handful of common verbs change meaning, not just tense. is 'knew'; is 'met for the first time'. is 'knew a fact'; is 'found out'. is 'tried', is 'refused', is 'managed to'. a María and a María are genuinely different sentences, so they cannot be swapped for variety.

Trigger words are hints, not laws

.

My grandfather was always generous.
Why?

and towards the preterite; and towards the imperfect. The meaning still decides: a whole life that is over takes the preterite, even with . Use the trigger word as a first guess, then ask whether the verb is an event or the scene.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

Read the full article · 5 min read

Practice

Practise this lesson

10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 29 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 8 of 14 in this chapter

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