talking about illness

Question

when talking about illness do you always use imperfeco?

if i say, 'when maria was sick last week'

is it "cuando maria estaba enferma la semana pasada?" .. or "estuvo enferma la semana pasada?"

muchas gracias

Answer 1

Spanish does not have a tense to talk about sicknesses and healthness, or a tense to talk about richness and poorness, or a tense to talk about StarTrekness or StarTrekless (forgive my sarcasm).

"Imperfect" is used when you don't want to delimit the start and end of an event, and you use preterite when you specifically want to do so. You can tell the same story with either tense, or even with other ones - everything depends on HOW do you want the story to be told - that's why we have two tenses.

There are situations where one tense (or the other) does not make sense, and other situations where both tenses make sense (but give a different perspective). It is a matter of perspective, not healthness or "StarTrekness".

María estuvo enferma la semana pasada: contemplate the whole week from the start to the end, and visualize María sick. That's it: you don't care about the specifics of the "being sick" event.

María estaba enferma la semana pasada: María was sick last week, but we don't know when or how often. Chances are we are about to be given more information about what happened to María then.