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The Imperfect Tense

The Imperfect Tense is one of two ways to talk about events that happened in the past in Spanish. (For more on when to use the Imperfect Tense, see Imperfect vs. Preterite.)

The imperfect happens to be one of the easiest tenses to conjugate in Spanish.

To conjugate "-ar" verbs, take off the ending and add the following:

This can lead to some rather funny sounding conjugations like "trabajaba." Note that there's only one accent mark and it occurs in the "nosotros" form.

To conjugate "-er" and "-ir" verbs take off the endings and add the following:

Notice that every conjugation has an accented "i."

Irregular Imperfect Verbs

There are only three irregular imperfect conjugations in the entire Spanish language and they are "ir," "ser," and "ver."

"Ir" means "to go," and its conjugations sort of look like a hybrid between "-ar" and "-er/-ir" endings:

Please notice that these are conjugations not endings.

"Ser" means "to be," and it's conjugations are totally irregular:

"Ver" means "to see" or "to watch." At first glance it may not look irregular; it has the regular endings for "-er/-ir" verbs, but in this case we're only going to take of the "-r" rather than the "-er" before conjugating: