👋🏽 Hi, I'm Saf! I teach CSEC Spanish at Arc School: live classes each week, lesson resources, exam practice and personalised coaching for your final exams. Or maybe you're not studying for an exam at all and just want to learn Spanish — you're welcome here too! ☺️ In this lesson, we'll learn how to choose between the preterite and imperfect tenses. Yup, there's more than one way to talk about the past in Spanish! We'll explore how these tenses help us describe situations, talk about past habits and experiences, and tell stories in both conversation and writing. We'll use an exam-style letter to put them into practice, but the skills apply well beyond letter writing. Pay attention to what each verb is doing—and then try telling your own story in Spanish.
Hola mis amigos 👋🏽
Today we're writing a complete letter together: a letter from your sister about the day she arrived late for a very important exam. And we're going to use it to get comfortable with the two past tenses in Spanish, the preterite and the imperfect.
In English, "I looked at the clock" could be one quick look or something you kept doing. In Spanish you have to choose: miré or miraba. In a story about the past, you make that choice again and again, and the choice changes what the sentence means.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
Differentiate between the imperfect and preterite;
form the imperfect of any regular verb, plus ser, ir and ver, the only three verbs that break the pattern;
set the scene of a story in the imperfect: the weather, the time, what people were doing;
move the story forward in the preterite, one event after another;
say that something happened while something else was going on, in one sentence;
say how you were feeling at the time and how you reacted at one moment, each in the tense it needs;
write a complete letter of 130 to 150 words that tells a story in the past and ends with what happens next.
In the full lesson you'll hear me read the whole letter, then we look at what every verb in it is doing. You'll practise both tenses on a new story and write a new letter of your own, with my answers at the end.
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Grab a pen. ¡Vamos! ✍🏽