in this video you're going to get an overview of the preterite and imperfect tenses in Spanish both of these are used to talk about things that happen in the past but the differences can be kind of subtle and confusing and can create misunderstanding sometimes so in this video I want to give you two stories plus one simple exercise to help you start to wrap your head around the differences between the two and when to use them we're going to look at these stories first and then explain the grammar behind them unfortunately the way that most people go about learning how to use these tenses is by memorizing a whole bunch of situations and a whole bunch of conjugations and then getting really stressed when they're trying to use it all in conversation with somebody else don't do that my goal here is to give you a simple overview help you get an idea for how this all works and then it's up to you to go practice that way when you are speaking with somebody else you can just sort of let the grammar happen in the background not think about it too much and let the words come out and just enjoy the fact that you're speaking Spanish so first picture a timeline of an afternoon of yours on vacation say you're at the beach you spent the afternoon on the beach and somebody asks you what did you do today what'd you do today and you reply is I was on the beach for the whole afternoon period end of story didn't go into detail talk about anything else that happened in this case we'll use the preterite the simple past tense estuve I was now let's take a different story a different take on the same situation say you spent the afternoon on the beach but this time you are telling somebody about your afternoon a few more things are going on a couple things interrupt what happened and and in general there's just more to tell in this case we're going to mix up the two tenses so you might start by saying is we use the imperfect of these verbs estaba in La Playa I was on the beach it was really hot to talk about the situation broadly to set the scene we use the preterite in this case to describe things that came and went that sort of interrupted the scene I had to get out the one time the Lifeguard saw the ones I was in the water for half an hour a fixed time frame now let's look at a second scenario where you might have to choose between these two verb forms picture a timeline of your childhood this time and imagine that you're telling a story about something that you used to do often for example is here we use the imperfect in this scenario era estawa ivamos and so on to talk about the things that we used to do with some regularity or that used to happen regularly basically stuff that happened repeatedly in the past when I was a kid broadly Siempre estaba I was always anos we would go where we used to go every year but we use the preterite to talk about things that came and kind of interrupted the normal sequence of events there was a hurricane we couldn't go I felt disappointed these are all things that interrupted the normal sequence there was one hurricane we couldn't go the once and I felt disappointed the once now these two stories are just an overview of this broad concept that you're going to come across over and over in Spanish if you haven't already and right now you might feel a little bit overwhelmed by AI all the stuff that it seems like there is to know about it one thing to know is that as you go the more you listen to Spanish and are surrounded by it you'll develop more of an intuition for when to use one versus the other and you won't have to think about it really consciously instead it'll just be automatic and the first step towards actually being able to use this in an automatic way is to practice practice on your own without the pressure of having somebody else in front of you create a story of your own one to two sentences long about something that happened yesterday or last week or something that you did repeatedly in the past leave your story in the comments and I'll be happy to provide feedback on it then over the course of the next week start to incorporate this into your Spanish routine maybe you're driving to work or going for a walk you can tell yourself a story each day about something that happened that day or the day before a very simple story you know don't over complicate it at the beginning one to two sentences about how you were eating breakfast and then the cat jumped on the table or anything really then with some practice under your belt you will start to feel a little bit more confident about which one of these verbs you can choose and then the key is when you're actually speaking with somebody to forget everything that you learned and just speak like I mentioned earlier let the grammar be in the background and just interact with the person try not to think too much about the grammar of what you are saying and just let the words come out trust what you have learned and enjoy the fact that you're speaking Spanish if you like this video and you want more tips to help you with your Spanish click subscribe and if you want even more go to breakthroughspanish.com where I have a free course that'll help you start learning Spanish more effectively and have more fun along the way thanks for watching