Help with preterite and imperfect translation.
If i wanted to say. "I hurt myself." Would id o so in preterite or imperfect. why?
5 Answers
"¡Me lastimé!" would mean "I hurt myself!" You would use this when something suddenly happens or happens a definite amount of times in the past. We would use the preterite in this situation.
The imperfect indicative would be used when the action was habitually done in the past. For example...
As a child, I would hurt myself falling off of my bike.
De niño, me lastimaba cayendo de mi bicicleta.
Of course, there are other uses for the preterite and imperfect tenses, so feel free to check this link for their uses and other verb forms.
Perhaps you'd find this free ebook to be useful.
Hello Jack,
Welcome to the SpanishDict forum. 
You asked,
If i wanted to say. "I hurt myself." Would id o so in preterite or imperfect. why?
Well, basically speaking, you use the imperfect indicative tense in Spanish when you want to say" I was reading (doing something)" / or " I used to play tennis (do something)" (ie: an habitual action) whereas the you would use the preterite indicative (simple past) for actions that have been completed at some time in the past!
Assuming that you were not in the habit of hurting yourself (accident prone/or self harming) I would say that you would use the preterite tense because you are talking about an action that has already been completed! 
There are often a number of valid /acceptable ways to express the same idea in any language and Spanish is no exception to this general practice!
One way to say I hurt myself uses the verb construction: hacerse daño
Me hice daño = I hurt myself
I hope this helps.
Would I do so in preterite or imperfect.
You would do so in preterite because you are not talking about a past action that occurred over an expressed or implied passage of time.
Now, if you wanted to say "I was hurting myself while the phone was ringing." you would use the imperfect, but who would say that!
GuitarWarrior ''I would hurt'' would be conditional tense. Imperfect would be like I was hurting or I used to be in pain.
