What's the difference between imperfect tense and preterit tense?
What's the difference between imperfect tense and preterit tense?
3 Answers
What's the difference between imperfect tense and preterit tense?
The preterit is the simple past tense
The imperfect past tense is another past tense in Spanish.
In English we can only make it by using the Modal "used to".
This can be done in Spanish like this
I used to live in London. "Solía vivir en londres" or "Vivía en Londres"
The AR verbs use the ending "aba" - hablaba for example.
BUT they don´t mean exactly the same thing and the imperfect past tense can also be used as we use the past continous in English.
I hope a native speaker can explain this better than I have.
Have a look at these in our reference section.
The preterite tense is used to describe an action that happened and then stopped. Yesterday, I walked for 45 minutes... Ayer, anduve por 45 minutos.
The imperfect tense is used to describe an event that has no definitive starting or ending point (as it pertains to the context of the story) Yesterday, I was walking when I almost fell....Ayer, andaba cuando casí caí.
You can often find both the preterite and the imperfect in the same sentence like the example above. However the imperfect can be used by itself.
It is important to think about what type of message you want to convey when you are choosing between the preterite and the imperfect.
- always use the imperfect tense to talk about someones age, or the weather. When I was five years old...Cuando tenía cinco años. It was windy yesterday...hacía viento ayer.
I hope you find this helpful.
This is a very common question, but a good one. 
Click hereto check out the verb reference section for this site. I think you will find this very helpful.
Buena suerte 
