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Probably you are at the point in your journey of speaking Spanish that you have studied the present tense quite a bit,
and you are now entering the world of past tense.
In Spanish, it is a bit more complicated than it is in English, and for this reason we are going to break things down quite a bit.
First up for most people is the preterite, which is a past-tense verb form; that is the focus of this series of videos.
In this video we will focus on forming the preterite of regular verbs, which is the vast majority of verbs.
We will focus on irregular preterite forms in Part 2, and its uses in Part 3.
The formation of regular preterite verbs is a bit tricky,
since the endings look nothing like what we have used in the present tense.
And that makes sense; it ensures that the audience can never misunderstand us; this is past, not present.
So typical, normal, regular verbs, such as hablar, comer, and vivir, look like this in the preterite.
But wait! It gets better!
Remember all of those stem-changing verbs in the present tense?
Remember the ones that frustrated us, because it took seemingly forever to learn which stem change they had?
Yeah, well, not here!
In the preterite, the number of verbs that are stem-changing is drastically reduced.
That means most of the stem-changing verbs you learned for the present tense,
like pensar and entender, are perfectly normal in the preterite; no stem changing at all!
One of the most frustrating parts for the preterite is that we have to remember that the first and third person singular forms—
the forms of ‘yo’ and of ‘él, ella, Usted’—
have accent marks on the last vowel.
More on this later.
There are some verbs that will undergo spelling changes, but these changes do not affect pronunciation.
All –car and –gar verbs will add a -u-, and the –c will change to a ‘q’.
Again, this is merely to keep the reader on track and understanding what sounds are being represented;
there is zero difference in pronunciation.
So ‘busqué’ and ‘entregué’ sound right;
without that -u-, we get ‘buscé’ and ‘entregé’.
That is definitely not what we want!
As for those verbs that have two front vowels to end the word— such as leer, oír and the like—
we will employ the use of a ‘y’ so that the word breaks into two syllables.
This way, Spanish stays true to its roots, and it makes a little easier to pronounce.
Ok, stem-changing verbs.
They do still exist in the preterite, but in highly reduced numbers.
In fact, they only are those –ir verbs that stem changed in the present tense,
and that it is only the third person forms that will have a stem-change.
There are no diphthongs here; just straight ‘-e’ to ‘i’, ’o’ to ‘u’.
Remember, that is a very, very short list!
So here are two of those verbs, in dormir and pedir, so that you can see the change; there are not many more than this.
One last bit: accent marks.
Those things are so important with preterite, and in past-tense verb forms in general.
Without them, well, we have a huge amount of confusion.
Without its accent mark, hablo does not mean ‘he spoke’; it means, ‘I speak’, as in now, in the present!
That accent mark is more than just a simple little diacritic on top of a vowel;
it conveys so much more information.
In fact, many beginning students over-emphasize that stressed vowel in the preterite,
just to get it ingrained in their minds that there is a shift of emphasis, and with that shift comes a big change.
We move from present to past, from third person to first.
Just FYI: accent marks play a big role in verb forms in Spanish.
We will see them with the other past-tense forms, and we will see them in other verb tenses.
They reflect a big change with respect to verbs, so play close attention to them.
If you need it, we do have a video on accent marks, and we do cover some of these topics there.
This is just one video in a three-part series on the preterite,
and no doubt there are still many questions that you have.
Hopefully between the three videos, we will catch them all.
There are a number of tutorial sites with great exercises to help you in practicing the formation of the preterite.
If you go to LenguaFranca.us, you will see a number of them listed on our Resources page.
Please like the video and leave any comments or questions that you have.
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¡Hasta pronto! ¡Adiós!