Preterite Tense: Irregular Verbs
Preterite Tense: Irregular Verbs
A small set of extremely common Spanish verbs abandon the regular preterite endings entirely and use their own stems — irregular in a way that has to be memorized outright.
Grammar Comparison
Grammar Comparison
New stems, and no accent marks
tener → tuve, tuviste, tuvo... (not 'tené'); the stem itself changes, and unlike regular preterites, there's no written accent
had, was/were, said — English's irregular past forms are also just memorized outright, one per verb
Verbs like tener (tuve), estar (estuve), poder (pude), and decir (dije) replace their entire stem for the preterite and take a slightly different set of endings, with no accent marks — a visible signal that you're dealing with an irregular verb. There's no shortcut here in either language: English memorizes 'had', 'was', 'said' as their own forms, and Spanish memorizes tuve, estuve, dije the same way.
Ser and ir share one irregular preterite
fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fueron — identical whether it means 'I went' or 'I was'
went vs. was — two completely different, unrelated words
Oddly, 'to be' (ser) and 'to go' (ir) share the exact same irregular preterite forms — fui can only be told apart by context. This has no English parallel at all: 'went' and 'was' look nothing alike, so expect to lean on sentence context rather than the verb form itself when you hear fui in Spanish.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
- English
- I had
- English
- I was (temporary)
- English
- I could / I was able to
- English
- I said
- English
- I made / I did
- English
- I came
- English
- I wanted
- English
- I went / I was
- English
- I found out / I knew
- English
- I put