The Spanish Imperfect Tense.

The imperfecto is one of the main Spanish tenses used for talking about the past.  As we’ll see, it is often used in conjunction with other past tenses.  This tense is also known, more formally, as the Pretérito imperfecto.

Whatever you want to call it, here’s how to conjugate the tense in the three main verb groups:

Spot the pattern?

That’s right, the ER and IR verbs have the same form in the imperfect tense.  The AR verbs want to be different though.

You should also pay attention to the pronunciation change in the AR verbs. Notice how the nosotros form has an accent, which means we stress the second sylable?

Let’s take a look at some examples:

• Siempre comía en casa de la abuela.*
  I always had lunch at my grandmother’s house.
• La secretaria llegaba tarde todos los días.
  The secretary arrived late every day. 
• Vivíamos en una pequeña casa con vistas al mar.
  We lived in a small house with sea views.
• Él vivía muy bien, pero siempre quería más.
  He lived very well, but he always wanted more.

*A very common occurrence in both Spain and Latin America. Do not be alarmed!

Irregular verbs

You’ll be pleased to find out that only three verbs are irregular in the imperfect tense. Here they are:

If you’re thinking that the verb Ver looks kind of regular, you’d be wrong! In regular ER verbs the ‘e’ is removed before the endings are added.

Uses of the imperfect tense

There are two uses of the imperfect tense.

1 Long duration

As you’ll have deduced from the example phrases, the imperfect tense is mainly used to give information about long duration events in the past. So we use it for permanent or semi-permanent states (where we lived, for example), routines (eating at grandma’s house) or repeated actions (the secretary arriving late).

2 Interrupted events

We often use the imperfect tense when we have two past actions, one of which lasts for more time than the other.  In this case, the ‘longer’ event might actually only last for a few minutes or even seconds, but the second event is even shorter!

• Iba muy rápido y no pudo tomar la curva.
  He was going very fast and couldn’t take the curve.
• Caminábamos por la playa cuando de repente vino una tormenta.
  We were walking along the beach, when a storm suddenly came in.

Did you notice how the Spanish imperfect corresponds to the English past continuous (He was going, etc.) in all the previous examples?

Two past tenses

In the final set of examples the imperfect tense was used together with the pretérito perfecto simple (The Spanish equivalent of the English Simple Past).

Imperfecto: Iba, Caminábamos
Pretérito perfecto simple: pudo, vino

The pretérito perfecto simple is actually the most common of the Spanish past tenses. To find out how to use it check out our class here.

Spanish phrases

For simple Spanish phrases that you can start to use straightaway, visit our section, Basic Spanish Phrases.

More tenses?

For more tenses, head to the index of Grammar classes.