Leave your fear about Spanish verbs behind with a simple, easy reading!

…“Spanish sounds so nice! I wish I could speak it! If only Spanish verbs weren’t so difficult”…

…”Ah!,  all those verbal tenses, all those possibilities and variations within Latin countries… I better leave it for tomorrow…”

…”if I can manage myself fine with barely two past tenses in English, do I need to use all those weird looking tenses that Spanish has?”…

…”Don’t even get me started with Subjuntivo… What do they smoke in Spain?!”…

If you have ever been interested in Spanish and feel like one the previous thought could be yours, then you are in a perfect spot to overcome your fears, you won’t regret giving it a try 🙂

Any sane mind would panic, at first, with Spanish verbs. Here, we know that. So our teaching method concerning verbs is a mix between grammatical repetition and logical comprehension. This second part is key, though. There must be a previous understanding behind the use of Spanish tenses, a more primitive intuitive approach.

First of all: what is a verbal tense?

People usually understand them as “actions”, but that can be a misleading approach, as the meaning behind any action is only described by the semantic field of the verb. Take a look at the following example:

“Paula ate an apple yesterday”

Let’s think about the following questions:

1. What is the action?
2. What is the verbal tense?
3. Are these two the same thing? Yes? No? Why?

I’ll leave you a blank – anti spoilers space to think about it, solutions coming right next! There is no other possibility than “eat”  being the action of the sentence.

So what’s the difference with the word “verbal tense”? → it also includes the concepts of time and finality, but always subjected to the speech time. So, in the example, a proper,  logical definition of the tense would be “a past, finished action”.

Second of all: What does the preterito mean in Spanish grammar?

A correct understanding of Spanish tenses demands a proper interpretation of its verbal tenses words, this way, we have to be familiar with <Pretérito> (past actions); <Presente> y <Futuro>, for time; and <Perfecto> or <Imperfecto> for finality.

Pretérito perfecto simple or Indefinido concerns an action that happened in the past and is finished:

A. “Paula ate an apple yesterday”

     “Paula comió una manzana ayer”

Pretérito imperfecto concerns an action that happened in the past and it isn’t finished at the moment of the speech time.

B. “Paula used to eat apples”

     “Paula comía manzanas”

C. “Paula was eating an apple when…”

     “Paula estaba comiendo una manzana cuando…”

Our next blog will be about the third and final element concerning verbal tenses and Spanish verbs → the mode: simple or compuesto? What do they mean? What is the difference between them? See you there!