Imperfecto • Spanish Grammar • Chatterbug

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Yes, I can't deny it, we Spanish speakers love talking about the past.

That's a little bit of drama.

I know, we can't help it sometimes. Anyways, here we have the imperfecto. It's a tense situated half way between the past and the present.

Are you kidding me? Is it in the limbo of verb tenses?

Kind of. With imperfecto we travel from the present moment we are in now to the present moment we were in in the past.

Do you mean it's like describing what was happening?

Antes estudiaba mucho, ahora no estudio nada.

I used to study a lot, now I don't study at all.

Me gustaba mucho viajar.

I used to love travelling.

De pequeña siempre lloraba.

When I was a kid, I used to cry all the time.

We like going into details as well as gossiping.

Construction:

We remove the infinitive ending AR/ER/IR and add the following endings instead:

Try to imagine the perspective of how things are seen when we use this tense.

The most amazing of all this is that imperfectoonly has TWO irregular verbs. Isn't it great?

ser ⇒ era, eras, era, éramos, érais, eran.

ir ⇒ iba, ibas, iba, íbamos, íbais, iban.