El imperfecto: era, hacía, jugaba
The pretérito of lesson 11 reports events: something happened and it ended. The imperfecto paints the room those events happened in — what the weather was like, how old you were, where you lived, what you did every single Sunday. English says it with 'used to', 'was -ing' and habitual 'would': Cuando era niña, jugaba en el jardín. Two sets of endings, three irregular verbs in the entire language, and five rows per verb, because ustedes and ellos share a form here as everywhere else.
The tense of what was going on
Every past sentence you have built so far pushed a single event out and closed the door on it: ayer comí, llegué tarde, mi papá volvió del mercado. The imperfecto does the opposite. It leaves the action open, unfinished, spread across a stretch of time — and that is exactly why it is the tense of childhoods, of weather, of descriptions and of habits. Vivíamos cerca del mar does not say when the living started or stopped; it says that for a whole span of your life, that was the situation. Nothing about the imperfecto is vague or literary, by the way: it is one of the most common tenses in ordinary speech, and you will hear it within a minute of anyone telling you about their week.
-AR verbs: the -aba endings
Cut -ar off the infinitive and add -aba, -abas, -aba, -ábamos, -aban. So hablar gives you yo hablaba, tú hablabas, él hablaba, nosotros hablábamos, ustedes hablaban. Five rows, and the last one covers your friends, your cousins and 'they' all at once — ¿Ustedes trabajaban acá? and Ellos trabajaban acá use the identical form. The only written accent in the whole set sits on -ábamos. Everything else you already own runs the same way: trabajaba, estudiaba, cantaba, jugaba, buscaba, caminaba, cocinaba.
-ER and -IR: one shared set
Here the tense does you a favor: -er and -ir verbs take exactly the same endings, -ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos, -ían. comer gives comía, comías, comía, comíamos, comían; vivir gives vivía, vivías, vivía, vivíamos, vivían. Notice that every single form carries an accent on the í — it is not optional decoration, it is what holds the two vowels apart, and a learner who drops it ends up writing something that is not a word. Also notice that yo and él/ella/usted are identical (yo comía, ella comía), so when it is not obvious from context, say the pronoun.
Three irregular verbs. That is all.
The imperfecto has exactly three irregular verbs in the entire language, and you know all three already. ser: era, eras, era, éramos, eran. ir: iba, ibas, iba, íbamos, iban. ver: veía, veías, veía, veíamos, veían. The accent shows up only on éramos and íbamos in the first two; ver keeps the -ía accent on every row. Verbs that misbehave in the present go quiet here: tener is simply tenía, hacer is hacía, poder is podía, jugar is jugaba with no stem change at all, querer is quería. Learn the three and the tense is done.
The four jobs it does
One: habits, the things you did over and over — Todos los días íbamos al mercado. Two: description — weather, age, time, feelings, how things looked: Hacía sol, Tenía nueve años, Eran las tres, Estaba contenta. Three: two actions running side by side, almost always with mientras — Mientras yo cocinaba, mi hermano estudiaba. Four: a scene already underway when something drops into it; the scene is imperfecto and the interruption is pretérito — Yo comía cuando mi papá volvió. If you can say 'was -ing' or 'used to' in English and it still sounds right, you want this tense.
Words that pull the imperfecto in
Certain words practically announce it: antes, siempre, todos los días, cada domingo, a veces, casi siempre, mientras, and above all cuando era niño / cuando era niña. In Latin America the warm everyday version of that last one uses the diminutive: cuando estaba chiquito, de chiquita, cuando éramos chicos — you will hear these far more often in a kitchen than the textbook de niño. They all take the same tense.
Backdrop and event, side by side
Aquel domingo comimos en el jardín is one lunch, finished, reported — pretérito. Aquel verano comíamos en el jardín is every lunch of a summer — imperfecto. Hizo calor en agosto treats the heat as a closed block of weather; Hacía calor mientras caminábamos makes it the air around the walk. Note that the partner of the imperfecto here is the plain pretérito, not the pretérito perfecto of the last lesson: a finished past event across Latin America is llegó, comimos, volvió. Choosing between the two is the whole of the next lesson, so do not agonize over it today — get the endings into your mouth first.
