preterite vs imperfect when using luego in sentence?!

Question

do you use preterite or imperfect when "luego" is in the sentence?

Answer 1

I don't think the presence of the word "luego" affects to the choice imperfect-preterit.

Íbamos a la playa y luego íbamos al parque.

Fuimos a la playa y luego fuimos al parque.

If you give us more context, or the sentence you mean, that would help for giving you some advice.

:) - Kiwi-Girl, Jan 3, 2013

Answer 2

I don´t think luego directly affects it either but, I can see where someone might think that, as the preterite is so often used to tell about a sequence of events entirely in the past, and one might often find those individual events of the sequence connected by the word luego, or perhaps entonces.

But of course cogumela is right, one could find luego between repeated, or habitual, or still-on-going events, and thus used with the imperfect (íbamos) too, such as in her first example,

We used to go to the beach, and then we´d go to the park.

But I think we see her second example in the preterite (fuimos), more often.

We went to the beach, and then we went to the park.

In this example with the imperfect isn't a bit confuesing? isn't it more literally "We were going to the beach and later we were going to the park", which sounds to me like for a time they were going to the beach and later they started going to the park? - discostew02, Jan 3, 2013