What are preterite tenses for verbs?

Question

What is the preterite tense for verbs like hacer, decir poder?

Answer 1

Hi Jessica, welcome to our forum.

The preterite tense is how we convey the simple past in Spanish. "I ate a cookie" would have the verb "comer" in the preterite tense: "Yo comí una galleta."

We have a nice article about the preterite tense in our reference section, here.

And you can see how to conjugate any verb into the preterite tense (or any other tense) using our verb conjugation tool.

Answer 2

Unfortunately the verbs that you chose to list are all irregular, and do not follow the regular pattern of most other verbs in the preterite tense. As suggested by Goyo, look up how to conjugate these verbs and put them in your memory bank.

While there are some discernable patterns in conjugating these and other irregular verbs, you will mostly just have to commit each one to memory for now.