Lesson 59: Past Tense: The dot in the past with 'er' and 'ir' verbs

In the last lessson we learned how to talk about a speicific moment in the past for 'ar' verbs like 'hablar. Now we'll cover verbs that end 'er' and 'ir' like 'I ate'

So for 'ar' verbs we saw the way to change them for our dot in the past was:

To get "I spoke" - take off the 'ar' and add 'é' - 'Hablé'
To get "He/she/it/you (formal) spoke" - take off the 'ar' and add 'ó' - 'Habló'

For verbs ending 'er' or 'ir':

To get "I ate" - take off the 'er' and add 'í' - 'Comí'
To get "He/she/it/you (formal) ate" - take off the 'er' and add 'ió' - 'Comió'

You'll notice for both 'ar' and 'er'/'ir' verbs the accent is being pushed to the end and we see that with the accents on the letters.

Spanish	English
Comí	I ate
Comió	He/she/it/you (informal) ate
Salí	I went out
salió	He/she/it/you (informal) went out
No salió todavía	She didn't go out yet / She didn't leave yet
No sé por que no salió todavía	I don't know why she didn't leave yet

'Que' as "than"

I've heard one person say that "'Que' is the glue that holds the Spanish language together" and it certainly does seem that way. We've already seen 'que' can mean "what" or "that" ... but it can aslo mean "than"!

Spanish	English
Comí más que él	I ate more than him (he ate)
Comió más que yo	He ate more than me / I (ate)

You'll see we're using 'él' and 'yo' here instead of 'le' and 'me'. English is a little strange in that it uses "him" when the core meaning of the sentence is "I at more than he ate". So sometimes we have to think about the core meaning to know what to use in Spanish because English is a bit mixed up!

Ver

We've already covered 'ver' in other tenses. Its pretty regular hear except that the 'i' in 'vi' has no accent.

Spanish	English
Vi	I saw
Lo vi	I saw him
No lo vi	I didn't see him

OK so lets try something longer: "I was him but he didn't see me".

"I saw him" - 'Lo vi'
"but" - 'pero'
"he didn't see me" - 'no me vió'

Spanish	English
Lo vi pero no me vió	I saw him but he didn't see me

'Nada' - "Nothing"

Something that bugs me in English is when people use double negatives and don't mean it - "I don't know nothing" while in Spanish it is actually the way things are said.

Spanish	English
No vi nada	I didn't see anything (nothing)
No comí nada	I didn't eat anything (nothing)
¿No comió nada?	Didn't eat anything?
¿Por qué no comió nada?	Why didn't you (formal) eat anything?

'Nadie' - "No one"

And here we see the double negative as well.

Spanish	English
Nadie vió nada	Nobody saw anything (Nobody saw nothing)

'Durar' - "to last"

This is quite an easy verb to remember because we see it in "Duracell batteries" and it's not there by accident! Now you'll see it every time you are in the shops and it will remind you of 'durar'.

It comes from "Duration" and this is also another way of finding the verb - we take off the 'tion' and add 'r' as we've done before with many other English words that end 'tion'

Spanish	English
Duró dos minutos	It lasted two minutes
Duré dos minutos	I lasted two minutes

We've also looked before at how we can get the 'ing' form of a word in many cases from the verb:

For 'ir'/'er' verbs we take off the 'ir'/'er' and add 'iente'
For 'ar' verbs we take off the 'ar' and add 'ante'

So 'interesar' was "to interest" and 'interesante was "interesting".

We can do the same with 'durar' to get "lasting"

Spanish	English
Durante dos minutos	lasting two minutes / for two minutes
Comió durante media hora	He ate for half an hour
Habló durante media hora	He spoke for half an hour

'Sin' ("without") and 'Parar' ("to stop").

We've seen that 'con' was "with" - 'sin' is the opposite, "without".

Spanish	English
Habló durante media hora sin parar	He spoke for half an hour without stopping

So first a quick reminder - after prepositions (with, of, etc.) - we use the to form of the verb and that is why we have 'parar' and not 'parada'.

Also you might be leafing through your notes because something is bothering you about this 'durante' and you'd be right to do it. When we talked about 'Para' and 'por' both meaning "for" we said that you use 'por' when you are talking about time.

So shouldn't it be 'Habló por media hora sin parar'. The answer is it can be - both ways are valid but it seems that 'durante' is used when you want to express that it was an unusual (mostly unusually long) period of time.

Lesson 60: Past Tense: The dot in the past with the 'We' form of verbs