Spanish: An Essential Grammar

To express actions in progress

The imperfect tense is used to talk about events or actions that weretaking

place at some time in the past. The beginning and end of these occurrences

is unspecified.

A typical narrative strategy involves using the imperfect to describe the

setting for an event that is narrated using the preterite:

Alberto y Juan se reían a carcajadas.

Alberto and Juan were roaring with laughter.

Me caí mientras bajaba la escalera.

I fell while I was going down the stairs.

Note: In this usage the imperfect has a similar meaning to the imperfect progres-

sive. The latter may be preferred to emphasize being ‘in the middle’ of an activity:

No pude contestar al teléfono porque estaba dando de comeral bebé‘I couldn’t

answer the telephone because I was feeding the baby’. See 11.3.2.

To describe states and conditions

The imperfect tense describes states, conditions or characteristics in the past:

La responsable era María. The person in charge was María.

No sabía su nombre. I didn’t know his name.

Carmen estaba enferma. Carmen was ill.

To describe habitual actions

The imperfect tense expresses actions or events that were repeated habitu-

ally, events to which the English phrase ‘used to’ may be applicable.

Habitual actions are sometimes signalled as such by phrases like a menudo

‘frequently’,de vez en cuando‘from time to time’, siempre‘always’, cada

día‘every day’, todas las semanas‘every week’:

Antes Lole trabajaba en un hospital.

Lole used to work in a hospital.

Ibamos todos los jueves al cine.

We used to go to the cinema every Thursday.

Cenábamos fuera a menudo.

We frequently dined out.

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11.1.3.2

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Simple tenses

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