Imperative Mood
It’s imperative to understand the imperative mood if you want to give orders, make requests, express desires, provide recommendations, offer advice, and prohibit actions.
tenses moods voices
Tiempos | Modos | Voces
Lessons on present, past, future, indicative, subjunctive, passive…
A2 - Low-Intermediate Spanish • lesson plans • tenses moods voices
Imperfect
They say practice makes perfect, so how can one of the most common Spanish past tenses be imperfect? In grammatical terms, "perfect" means "complete," so the Spanish imperfect tense is used to describe an incomplete or ongoing action or state of being, especially when it lasted for a long time.
A2 - Low-Intermediate Spanish • tenses moods voices
Imperfect Progressive
The Spanish imperfect progressive is very similar to its English counterpart (was + -ing). In both languages, the imperfect progressive expresses an action that was in progress in the past when it was interrupted by another event.
B2 - Upper-Intermediate Spanish • tenses moods voices
Imperfect Subjunctive
The imperfect tense of the subjunctive mood is used to express the same subjectivity in Spanish as the present subjunctive, but in the past.
B2 - Upper-Intermediate Spanish • tenses moods voices
Imperfecto vs Pretérito
Knowing whether to use the pretérito or imperfecto is particularly difficult when translating certain verbs into Spanish. Very broadly speaking, the imperfect is equivalent to was/were + ___ing, but some English verbs are not often used in this form. So when translating was, had, and liked into Spanish, you have to think about the meaning in order to decide which tense to use.
Infinitive
The Spanish infinitive, which always ends in –ar, –er, or –ir, serves as the name of any given verb. It’s what you look up in dictionaries and verb conjugation tables, so it’s important to learn the infinitive of every new verb you see or hear.
A2 - Low-Intermediate Spanish • tenses moods voices
Ir a – Near Future
You can explain what will happen in the near future with the construction ir a + infinitive; for example, El avión va a aterrizar en dos minutos – “The plane is going to land in 2 minutes.”
A1 - Beginning Spanish • tenses moods voices
Passive Voice
As seen in this sentence, the passive voice is used to indicate that something is being done to a subject by an agent. It’s passive because the subject is being acted upon, rather than acting as in the active voice.
B1 - Intermediate Spanish • tenses moods voices
Past Participle
The past participle is essential in the creation of compound verb tenses/moods and the passive voice, and it can also be used as an adjective.
A2 - Low-Intermediate Spanish • tenses moods voices
Past Perfect aka Pluperfect
The past perfect, also called the pluperfect, is a verb tense that distinguishes between two related things that happened in the past, indicating which one occurred before the other.