The Preterite: What Happened
The preterite is the tense for finished events — things that started and ended. It's how you say what you did yesterday, where you went last year, and what happened at the party.
This is the single biggest step up from A1. Once you have it, most of your conversations stop being stuck in today.
Vocabulary
- hablé
- I spoke
- comí
- I ate
- viví
- I lived
- fui
- I went / I was
- hice
- I did / I made
- tuve
- I had
- estuve
- I was (location/state)
- dije
- I said
- vi
- I saw
- anoche
- last night
- ayer
- yesterday
- la semana pasada
- last week
Example Phrases
Ayer comí en un restaurante.
Yesterday I ate at a restaurant.
¿Qué hiciste el fin de semana?
What did you do at the weekend?
Fui al cine con mi hermana.
I went to the cinema with my sister.
No dije nada.
I didn't say anything.
Llegamos muy tarde.
We arrived very late.
Grammar note
Regular preterite endings
-ar verbs take -é, -aste, -ó, -amos, -asteis, -aron: hablé, hablaste, habló. Both -er and -ir verbs share one set: -í, -iste, -ió, -imos, -isteis, -ieron: comí, comiste, comió.
The accent on the first and third person singular is not decoration — it carries the meaning. Hablo is "I speak"; habló is "he/she spoke". Drop the accent and you've changed the tense and the person.
Grammar note
Ser and ir share a past tense
Fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuisteis, fueron is the preterite of *both* ser (to be) and ir (to go). Spanish simply doesn't distinguish them here.
Context does all the work: fui a Madrid is "I went to Madrid"; fui profesor is "I was a teacher". This looks alarming and is almost never actually ambiguous.