The Preterite Tense is a very useful because we spend lots of time talking about things in the past. For example, yesterday we went to town and last year I bought a new car. However, it’s a pretty tricky tense to get to grips with. For starters, the Preterite Tense with regular verbs can take a while to get your head around but when it comes to irregular verbs in the Preterite Tense, the list can seem endless.
My advice it to tackle them bit by bit and to keep in mind that you don’t need to try and learn every irregular verb in the Preterite Tense. Work on the most well used verbs and learn them in groups. You’ll find plenty of practice at Simple Spanish Tips, so learn a few at a time and practise them before moving onto the next set of irregulars.
There’s no need to rush when learning the Preterite Tense with Irregular verbs… they are not going anywhere!
Here’s a list of the irregularities in groups…
Take it one group at a time… Learn, practise, enjoy!
| Group 1 | SER (To be) and IR (To go) | Learn | Practise here Practice here |
| Group 2 | Ver (To see) and Dar (to give) | Learn | Practise here Practise here |
| Group 3 | The Key Irregular/High Frequency Verbs- Set of 12 | Learn | Practise here Practise here Practise here Practice here |
| Group 4 | -IR verbs that change their stem in the present tense but change differently in the Preterite Tense | Learn | Practise here |
| Group 5 | Verbs that change orthographically (spelling wise) in the Preterite Tense but in the “yo” form only | Learn | Practise here Practise here Practise here Practise here Practise here Practise here |
| Group 6 | Verbs that use the ending “yó” (rather than ió) and “yeron” (rather than ieron) | Learn | Practise here Practise here |
How did you get on?
Hopefully you’ve taken my advice and worked on these groups one at a time. Don’t worry if you are finding this tense a bit overwhelming. Perhaps you feel like you’ll never remember all these irregularities… You will, it just takes time and practice.
A final thought
The Preterite Tense with Irregulars is probably the most challenging of tenses to master so don’t be hard on yourself when you make a mistake. It is totally normal to take two steps forward and one step backwards when learning how this tense works and that’s just considering the conjugation. The other element of the Preterite Tense is knowing when to use it, so if you need any help deciding when to use the Preterite Tense rather than the Imperfect Tense, take a look at my Imperfect VS Preterite blog.
The best piece of advice is to keep at it! If you get frustrated, just take a break and work with the Regular Preterite or even another tense, if you feel the need. The Irregular Preterite Tense will always be here when you are ready to revisit it.
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