The Secret of the Past in Spanish Revealed

Last week we were talking about finding simple and efficient ways to help our students understand the hidden secrets of Spanish grammar. We spoke about “the Occam’s knife” and the importance of finding easy solutions to big problems.

I certainly don’t want to brag, but I am going to explain how I’ve figured out a way to effectively handle a classroom full of A2 students that have all flown into a panic because they’ve just discovered that on top of having to learn the morphology of THREE past tense forms (the native language of many students has just two at most), they’ve also got to know when to use each one, they can’t of course just guess and hope to get it right.

We’ll start by talking about how the names for grammatical elements are often arbitrary, although at times they do suggest their meaning to a certain degree. If you’re working with the three preterits in Spanish for example, Perfecto, Indefinido and Imperfecto, look for some type of logic behind the names. What does PERFECTO mean? Something perfect is something that can’t be improved upon, so we can consider it completed. When forming the perfecto, we use the auxiliary verb in the present, together with the participle of the conjugated verb. From here we can easily conclude that: Perfecto = completed action in the present /or related in some way to the present.

Secondly, if something perfect is completed than something imperfect is not. This is one of the keys to the usage of the Imperfect: Imperfecto =  unfinished action in the past, unlimited action in the past (there’s also the descriptive use of the Imperfecto which is pretty straight forward).

The indefinido is one of those cases in which its name doesn’t suggest its meaning any more than the name patata or obelisco would. Here, I play with the phonetic imagery of the Pretérito Indefinido:  it’s the only form of the past tenses that is conjugated in the aguda form, with the stress on the final syllable. This rhythm, which is so common in French, sounds slightly aggressive in Spanish, like something hitting a table… and this is where my idea comes in: if the Indefinido is “trabajó”, then this aggressive sound corresponds with an aggressive point of view chronologically speaking. In other words, Indefinido = action at a specific time in the past, or at least a LIMITED action, completed in the past but which doesn’t continue to the present.

Beginning with these three basic ideas, I guide my students along a path of learning that’s composed of three basic questions.

It’s all based on the following premise: when you want to talk about something that happened in the past, the idea, the story, is clear to you. So, the first thing you have to think about is, can I picture what I’m saying as a photo? If you can, then it’s a description of something, and you use the Imperfecto. If the answer is no, then you’ll have to ask yourself a second question: does what I’m saying have to do with the present? If the answer is yes, then you’ll need to use the Perfecto.  If the answer is no again, you just have to ask one final question: Is there a limit? If there is, then use the Indefindo, if not, use the Imperfect.

This all may sound a little confusing, but by using an example, you can help make it clearer. To illustrate this, we’ll use a story that has the following elements: Andrés, last Saturday, walking on the beach, finding a five euro bill.

We’ll start by putting these elements through the system. Andrés is the subject of the story, that’s clear. The context is in the past, so we have to ask: is pasear por la playa like a photo? If the students says yes, then use the Imperfect (paseaba por la playa), but even if the student says no, because he or she thinks of going for a walk as more of an action than a description, just ask the second question: is it related to the present? The answer is NO, because we’re talking about last Saturday, so we ask the next question: is there a limit? How long did Andrés spend walking? The answer is clearly “we don’t know” or “that’s not relevant”, in which case, we end up again with the Imperfecto, which somehow guarantees that this system works because it produces “paseaba por la playa” or “estaba paseando por la playa”. Next, “Encontrar un billete de cinco €” is not a photo, it’s the representation of the moment in which Andrés bends down to pick up the bill. The meaning itself of the verb encontrar refers to a specific time, so we can answer yes to the question of whether or not this refers to a limited action, and that means that we need to use the Indefinite.

We finally end up with a sentence like “El sábado pasado Andrés estaba paseando por la playa y encontró un billete de cinco euros”, which is a correct way to explain an event that happened in the past.

I think that this is a good system for navigating the stormy waters of the past tenses and avoiding any unnecessary trauma. It may not be enough to greatly expand your student’s knowledge of grammar, but it works as a way to get started.