
Poder (to be able to) succeeded or (in the negative) failed The ordinary meaning of the verb Changes its meaning in the preterit to:Ĭonocer (to know someone) met or introduced In the preterit, certain verbs take on a different meaning in the preterite: (I left the house, and I arrived at school at eight o’clock.)Īnother use of the preterit in Spanish is for some verbs that show a mental state. Salí la casa y llegué a la escuala a las ocho. (I had (or did have) breakfast yesterday.) (My father arrived (or did) arrive yesterday.) Spanish uses the preterit (pretérito) to express an action completed at some definite time in the past: Your “past work is finished” with the preterit For now we’ll focus our discussion on the Spanish simple past tenses-the preterit and imperfect. Spanish does the same with the help of the verb haber (to have). Both those verb forms are compound and need a form of the helping verb haber (to have).

They are the present perfect I have worked, and the past perfect, I had worked.

The past is the past, right? In English, using the simple present tense, we say “we work.” With the simple past tense, we say “we worked.” Also, with English verbs there are other ways to show a past action. The verb endings for both the preterit and imperfect verb forms How Spanish has more than one past tense: the preterit and the imperfect
#Hay in past tense spanish how to
For a more in-depth discussion on the basics of verb conjugation, see our resource, “ How to conjugate verbs in Spanish.”

A “simple” tense is a verb consisting of a single word formed by adding an ending to a verb stem. The structure Spanish uses to conjugate the simple past tense is the same as for the simple present tense.
