It’s Professor Dave, let’s compare tenses.
We just learned about the imperfect tense.
And we also know about the passato prossimo.
It may seem daunting to even learn these tenses, let alone know when to use them, particularly
as they are not interchangeable.
But as with everything else when learning a language, exposure and repetition is key,
so let’s go through a few general rules and examples that will help you know what to do.
First, the imperfect is sometimes defined as a durative tense, meaning it describes
a continuous action, which means the same thing as a progressive action.
This is something ongoing in the past.
The way we say this in English, is usually something like I was ___-ing.
In this case, the watching is paired with the ringing.
The TV watching is ongoing, but the phone ringing is sudden, and interrupts the first action.
That is a construction that is quite common for the imperfect tense.
Another clue is the presence of the word “mentre”, which means while, and suggests ongoing action.
It might be useful to visualize the imperfect action as a wave, continuous, while the passato
prossimo is an arrow, punctuated and finished.
Let’s see some examples.
Notice that one verb uses the imperfect, while the other uses passato prossimo.
Again, this is because one action is ongoing, while the other is sudden.
We can also have two progressive contemporaneous actions, meaning that they are happening at
the same time.
The imperfect will then be used for both verbs.
The second guideline we want to mention is that the imperfect is used to describe a habitual
or repetitive action, something that happened over and over in the past for a certain period of time.
The point in time is left vague, in that the beginning and end are not specified.
The verb could be accompanied by adverbial expressions that will make these situations
a little easier to identify.
Passato prossimo, instead, will use precise time expressions, things like last year, yesterday,
this morning, and so forth.
Let’s see some more examples.
The next guideline tells us that the verb in the imperfect tense is descriptive, and
it is used in order to describe a person or thing or situation which would not change
immediately.
These are usually called background situations.
These add details to the story but are not essential for advancing the plot.
This young woman was already beautiful, blonde, and twenty-five just before I met her, and
most likely continued to be these things after we parted ways.
Therefore these tenses could never be simple past, since this tense only describes completed actions.
Another example.
Another rule to remember is that descriptions of the weather typically use the imperfect.
Unless it’s the main thing you are trying to communicate, weather tends to be a background
condition, and becomes part of the ongoing situation.
The important thing here is that I went to Florence for a conference.
The fact that it was raining but not cold is just a detail of the story.
Even the fact that Florence was beautiful requires the imperfect because this is not
a completed action, it is a continuous state.
Florence continues to be beautiful even after you leave.
You are now probably starting to understand why the choice of these tenses requires some practice.
The same verb can take both tenses, and it’s only the situation and context that will determine
which tense to use.
Here are just a few more examples, some using the imperfect, some using passato.
Now that we know how and when to use these tenses, let’s check comprehension.