El pretérito: hablé, comí, viví
The everyday past across Latin America is one tense with no helper verb in front of it: the pretérito. Cut the infinitive ending, add a new one, and the verb becomes finished business — hablé, comí, viví, ayer trabajé, ya comí. It covers what happened yesterday and what happened ten minutes ago, and it does not care whether the day is over: Hoy fue un día muy bueno. Better still, three sets of endings shrink to two, because -er and -ir take exactly the same ones.
Something happened, and it is over
The pretérito is the tense for an event with edges: it started, it ended, and you could point at when. Ayer trabajé. Comí en el mercado. Camila cantó una canción. Nothing has to be far away in time — what you did ten minutes ago takes this tense too, and so does what you did before breakfast. This is the past you will hear all day from Ciudad de México to Buenos Aires: in the taxi, at the tiendita, on the phone with your mamá. There is no auxiliary verb to build, no participle to remember. The ending on the verb carries the whole message, which is why it is the first past tense worth owning.
-ar verbs: hablé, hablaste, habló
Drop the -ar and add the preterite endings: yo hablé, tú hablaste, él habló / ella habló / usted habló, nosotros hablamos, ustedes hablaron / ellos hablaron / ellas hablaron. Five rows, the way every ladder in this course runs — ustedes takes the same form as ellos, whether you are talking to two friends or to two strangers: ¿Ustedes trabajaron el domingo? Three rows need a second look. hablé (I spoke) and habló (he spoke) sit one vowel apart, and each depends on its accent to say who did it. And hablamos is identical to the present-tense form, so the sentence around it decides: Hoy hablamos mucho is 'we talked a lot today', Todos los días hablamos mucho is 'we talk a lot every day'.
-er and -ir share one set of endings
In the present, comer and vivir part ways in the nosotros row: comemos against vivimos. In the pretérito they agree on everything. comí, comiste, comió, comimos, comieron. viví, viviste, vivió, vivimos, vivieron. Same endings, letter for letter — learn one verb and you have the other two hundred. escribir and abrir come along for free: escribí una carta, abrí la puerta. Watch the nosotros row again: vivimos is a twin of the present, but comimos is not, because the present is comemos. One small bend worth knowing now, since you already use the verb: leer goes leí, leíste, leyó, leímos, leyeron — a y appears where an i would otherwise be stranded between two vowels.
The accent is the whole tense
hablo = I speak. habló = he spoke. hablé = I spoke. A single written accent separates what you do every week from what somebody did once, and there is nothing else in the sentence to rescue you. The same trap sits on the other side: como (I eat) is stressed on the first syllable, comió (he ate) on the last, and comí (I ate) tells your voice to land on that final i. Say them out loud with the stress in the right place and the accent stops looking like decoration — it is a note about where your voice goes. People do drop accents in messages and rebuild the tense from context, but you are learning to write them, and here they count.
Five verbs, four sets of endings
A handful of very common verbs build the pretérito from a changed stem, and those verbs lose the accents in the yo and él rows. ser and ir share a single set — fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fueron — and the sentence tells you which verb you are hearing: Fui a Lima (I went), Fue un domingo muy bueno (it was). hacer: hice, hiciste, hizo, hicimos, hicieron; the z in hizo is only spelling, since with seseo it sounds exactly like the c in hice. ver: vi, viste, vio, vimos, vieron, all short, no accents. decir: dije, dijiste, dijo, dijimos, dijeron. Later you will meet tener → tuve, estar → estuve, querer → quise. There are about a dozen in all, and they arrive one sentence at a time.
ya, todavía no, alguna vez
Three little words live with this tense. ya = already: ¿Ya comiste? is what somebody will ask you in the middle of the afternoon, and Ya comí is the answer — or just Ya. todavía no = not yet: Todavía no escribí la carta. alguna vez = ever, at some point: ¿Alguna vez comiste ceviche? Notice that English reaches for a perfect — 'have you eaten', 'I haven't written' — in most of those, while Spanish here stays with the plain preterite. And hoy works with it as comfortably as ayer does: Hoy trabajé mucho, Hoy fue un día muy bueno. The day is unfinished; what happened inside it is finished, and the verb is talking about that, not about the day.
So when do you say he comido?
The compound past — haber plus a participle, he comido, he trabajado — is real Spanish and you will meet it in lesson 21. Its job here is experience and open-ended time: Nunca he ido a Chile. What it does not do in this half of the world is carry ordinary finished events. For 'I ate an hour ago', 'we went yesterday', 'she said it this morning', the sentence you will hear from Monterrey to Montevideo is the preterite: comí, fuimos, dijo. If you have studied from a book written in Spain, this is the one habit to adjust — Spain uses the compound form for today's events, and this course does not. Ask ¿Ya comiste? and you sound like you live here.
