Past tense and Future tense
I have a hard time remembering how to conjugate and state verbs in past tense and future tenses, any suggestions for help? Gracías
3 Answers
I would focus on learning one tense at a time. It might be more practical to work on the past tenses first, since we tend to discuss things that have occurred in the past a bit more than things that will happen in the future.
Choose five to ten common verbs and create flashcards with all of the conjugations. As you go through your day, try to create sentences with these verbs based on what you have already done or what the people in your life have already done.
Bebí café./ Fui a trabajar.
The best way to really make these verbs a part of your life is to internalize them by making them meaningful to you. It is much easier to learn if you are describing events that have occurred in your own life vs. just studying practice sentences from a grammar book.
Once you feel more confident with the past tenses, try the future. The future tense is extremely easy compared to the past tenses. 
Buena suerte
Hi, George. In the future tense, you just have to add the endings onto the infinitive; there's no getting rid of the ar, er, or ir, unlike other tenses. Then for imperfect verbs, I would recommend associating -aba and -ía with the imperfect, and then you just have to remember which letters go after the -aba and -ía for each person (none, -s, none, -mos, -is, -n). And for the preterite, I think you just have to memorize the regular endings. As the others say, I would recommend working on one tense at a time. Though it doesn't help you much now to know that it's really just a matter of practice, it is; it will be second nature soon.
My suggestion is that you don't learn the future right now. For now, use the "IR + a" construction for your future tenses. Instead focus on the two main past tenses, preterite and imperfect.
Find a way to say practice sentences, practicing each of them over and over until you can't forget them.
Then down the road when you feel great about past tenses, learn the future and the conditional, because they are very similar. (And the conditional uses endings you learned for the imperfect.)
