How to Use the Preterite Tense (Animated)

Welcome to understanding the Spanish Preterite Tense!The preterite tense is used to describe actions that were completed at a specific moment in the past.These actions have a clear beginning and end, like snapshots of specific moments that have already happened.Let's look at some examples of completed actions in the past.The preterite tense has several key characteristics that make it unique.To better understand the preterite tense, let's compare it with another past tense form.While the preterite describes specific, completed actions like 'I ate breakfast at 8 AM', the imperfect tense describes habitual actions like 'I used to eat breakfast at 8 AM'.Now that we understand what the preterite tense is, let's move on to learning how to form it.Regular verbs in Spanish follow predictable patterns when conjugated in the preterite tense.For verbs ending in AR, we remove the AR ending and add new endings specific to each subject.The new endings are: é, aste, ó, amos, asteis, and aron.For verbs ending in ER and IR, we follow a similar pattern but with different endings.These verbs take the endings: í, iste, ió, imos, isteis, and ieron.Let's look at some example sentences using these conjugations.Here are more verbs to practice with. Notice how they follow the same patterns we learned.Now that we understand regular verb patterns, let's move on to time expressions.In Spanish, specific time expressions help us know when to use the preterite tense.Let's start with 'ayer', meaning yesterday. This is one of the most common time markers.We also use 'anteayer' for the day before yesterday.For longer time periods, we use 'la semana pasada', meaning last week.When talking about last month, 'el mes pasado', we can see how the calendar changes.And for even longer periods, we use 'el año pasado' for last year.These time expressions are used with specific dates and completed actions.They always indicate definite time periods in the past.Let's look at some more examples of how these time expressions are used in complete sentences.