Imperfect Tense
Imperfect Tense
English uses one plain past tense for both 'I ate dinner' and 'I used to eat dinner every day'. Spanish gives these two ideas entirely separate verb forms.
Grammar Comparison
Grammar Comparison
For ongoing, repeated, or background past actions
comía todos los días (I used to eat every day), era joven (I was young) — habitual or ongoing states
I used to eat, I was young — English marks this with 'used to' or just context, not a separate verb form
The imperfect describes what was habitually true or ongoing in the past, with no defined endpoint — describing routines, background conditions, or things that were simply the case at the time. English handles this idea with helper words like 'used to' or 'would', layered onto the same simple past form you already know — Spanish instead gives it its own dedicated conjugation.
Only three irregular verbs in the entire imperfect
ser → era, ir → iba, ver → veía — everything else follows one of two totally regular patterns
no equivalent — English's past tense has many irregular verbs (went, was, saw, ate...)
Unlike the preterite's long list of irregulars, the imperfect has only three: ser, ir, and ver. Every other Spanish verb — no matter how irregular it is elsewhere — conjugates completely predictably in the imperfect. This makes the imperfect, ironically, one of the easiest tenses in Spanish to produce correctly, even though English's own irregular past tense (went, was, saw, ate) offers no comparable shortcut.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
- English
- I used to eat
- English
- I used to speak
- English
- I used to live
- English
- I was / it was
- English
- I used to go
- English
- I used to see
- English
- there was / there were
- English
- when I was a child
- English
- always
- English
- every day