THE IMPERFECT
The imperfect is the other half of the Spanish past. Where the preterite narrates events, the imperfect describes: what things were like, what used to happen, what was going on. Hablaba can mean “I was speaking”, “I used to speak”, or simply “I spoke, back then” — English needs three phrasings for what Spanish does with one tense.
The regular endings
This is the friendliest set of endings in the language. The -er and -ir classes share one pattern, as in the preterite, and the yo and él forms are identical — hablaba is both “I spoke” and “he spoke”, with context doing the work.
hablar → habl- + …
comer → com-, vivir → viv-
Every -ía ending carries its accent, in every person — comía, comíamos. The -aba set takes one only on nosotros: hablábamos.
Describing, not narrating
Use the imperfect for how things were — background, habit, states, time, age, weather — and the preterite for what happened. A story typically sets its scene in the imperfect and then advances in the preterite.
Cuando era niño, jugaba en la calle.
When I was a child, I used to play in the street. A habit in the past, with era setting the time of life.
Eran las diez y llovía.
It was ten o'clock and it was raining. Time and weather: pure description, so both verbs are imperfect.
Estaba cansado, así que no salí.
I was tired, so I didn't go out. The state is imperfect; the decision (no salí) is a preterite event.
Only three irregular verbs
The imperfect has exactly three irregular verbs in the entire language — ser, ir and ver — plus their derivatives. Every other verb, however badly it behaves elsewhere, is perfectly regular here.
ser — era, eras, éramos…
ir — iba, ibas, íbamos…
ver — veía, veías, veíamos…
Even tener — irregular in the present, the preterite and the future — is a plain tenía here. Compare tener across its tenses, or ser for one of the three that do change.
A phrase you will use constantly
Había — the imperfect of haber — means “there was” or “there were”, and it is how Spanish describes what a scene contained: había mucha gente (“there were a lot of people”). One form covers singular and plural, and it is one of the most frequent words in any story told in the past.