What You Used to Do as a Kid
Okay. Last time we did grandma's kitchen, the imperfect for describing a place — smelled like, was always, used to have that one drawer that stuck. Same tense, new job today. We're using it to talk about routines. What you used to do, not what you did once.
That's the whole split with the imperfect. One-time thing that happened and finished? Preterite, we already did that one to death with the haircut story and the weekend stuff. Repeated thing, the thing that just happened over and over because that's how your life worked back then? Imperfect. "Cada verano íbamos a la piscina." Every summer we'd go to the pool. Not one summer. Every summer, ongoing, background noise of your childhood.
The pattern, quick
For -ar verbs: -aba, -abas, -aba, -ábamos, -aban. For -er and -ir verbs: -ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos, -ían.
Jugaba. Comía. Vivíamos. That's basically it. This tense is super forgiving compared to the preterite irregulars we fought through a couple lessons back. There's really only three irregulars total — ser, ir, ver — and I'll write those on the board. Everything else just follows the pattern above and doesn't try to be clever about it.
Here's the thing though. Knowing the endings and being able to talk about your childhood for two straight minutes are different skills. The ending is grammar. The talking is the actual class.
What we're doing with it
I'm going to ask you: what did you do every day as a kid? Not one memory. The routine. Walked to school, or your mom drove you, or you took the bus and hated it. What you did after school. What your family did on Sundays, every Sunday, same as the last one. What chore you got stuck with. What you were scared of. What your grandma made you eat that you hated.
This is where people freeze up, because it feels like a bigger question than it is. You don't need a beautiful memory. You need boring true details said out loud in Spanish. "Todos los domingos mi papá cocinaba panqueques." That's it. That's a whole sentence and it's true and nobody needs more than that to start.
Pair up, three minutes each way, go.
A practical way to prep this at home
If you want to walk in with something instead of freezing when I call on you, here's what actually works, no worksheet required:
- Pick one age. Not "my whole childhood," that's too big. Pick like, age 9. What was normal at age 9.
- Think in categories, not sentences. School, food, chores, weekends, trouble you got into. Just nouns first. Then verb them.
- Say it out loud in your car or your kitchen before class. Doesn't have to be right. Has to happen out loud once before it happens out loud in front of a partner.
- Don't translate the English memory word for word. If the real memory is complicated, simplify it in Spanish rather than building the fancy English sentence first and converting. That's the trap, and it's the whole reason you sound stuck. Say the simple true version.
Peter and the smug dinner correction
I'll tell you why I actually trust this tense now, because there's a story behind it.
My son Peter, he's 14, corrected my verb tense at dinner one night. Super pleased with himself about it too, had that look. And here's the annoying part — he was right. I'd used preterite where I should've used imperfect, some story about what we "used to do" at my in-laws' house, and I said it like it was a one-time thing.
So instead of just saying "yep, you're right," which is what he wanted, I made him explain why it was right. Not just correct me — explain the rule behind the correction. And he got about halfway through and stalled out completely. Couldn't do it. Didn't actually know why, he just knew the sound of it was off.
We were even after that. That's kind of the whole point of this class, honestly — you can develop an ear for what's right before you can explain what's right, and that's not a lesser way of knowing it. It's actually how native speakers work most of the time. Nobody's running a chart in their head at the dinner table.
One thing I'll say plainly
Grammar serves the conversation, not the other way around. I'm not gonna quiz you on the imperfect endings in isolation and call that progress. Progress is you telling me a true, slightly boring detail about being nine years old, using the right tense because it felt right, not because you diagrammed it first.
Before next time
Pick your age, pick three things that were just normal life back then, and say them out loud once before you walk in. Doesn't have to be interesting. Just has to be yours. 💛