La Clave - Narrating the Past with the Preterit and Imperfect

Awesome lesson, really well done!

I found the pencil analogy helpful.

Leo's mama sent us some pictures of that party...

awwwww...

Thanks JP for uploading the pictures! So yeah it's all true! I was the happiest kid on earth that day!

Estoy de acuerdo con cutthatcity.

The pencil very simply illustrates the difference entre los dos tiempos.

I wish I could have as much fun in work as you guys seem to have!

hola Leo,
Es bueno que contrataron a Peter Pan a ponerse de pie para la piñata porque, si en realmente  se había Superman que nunca podian haber roto abierta.

¡Pobre Marco!

Era muy generoso porque le dio a Esti su abrigo y luego tenía que sufrir tanto por su bondad.  

Tienes razón cobre pero creo que Súperman está bajo control porque le han atado y ...

¿Quién puede decir que ése es el veradero Súperman? 

Yo puedo ver dos en la foto :)

JP

Como siempre una excelente lección. Como pueden ver quiero tanto a mi trabajo y a JP que tuve que comer seis galletas!! y por lo general como una solamente!.

brilliant..

Hóla todos.
Esta lección es la más mejor. Ustedes trabajaban mucho para hacerlo. Ustedes lo hacieron muy bueno.
"kudos" a equipo de SpanishPod  Gracias Abuelo Jack

Actual conversation at the office: 

JP:  Leo!

Leo:  ¿Sí?

JP:  If I buy some cake, can we push your face into it?  It's for La clave. 

Leo:  ...yah...   :)

Sometimes this job is a kick in the pants...

Another great lesson, guys!  JP you sure have a way with teaching...guess its your calling.  The pencil analogy is brilliant.

Bravo, Superman! for taking one for the team  :)

Cool!

I had a blast recording this with the SpanishPod team!  Great job JP the video is amazing! 

Gracias JP, Lili, Leo y por supuesto mi adorable tormento.. Esti!

MM

Hi everyone, thanks so much for the enouraging words.  It was fun...

• making Marco suffer in the cold
• shoving Leo's face into five pieces of cake
• making Lili eat Oreo cookies for the sake of grammar! 
  

Torturing my coworkers is the fun part for me; I'm kind of surprised everyone cares about the pencil!  :)

By the way, those Oreo cookies Lili ate?  When she wasn't looking I swapped them for Chicken McNuggets...

The cake part was AMAZING I could not stop laughing from the concept of repetitively putting someone head into a cake everyday of the week, that is simply the perfect way (for the imperfect tense) to get the concept, but got to admit Marco did not recieve much hospitality when he came to you guys in Spanish Pod, I bet you all he is doing now is writting a book of tricking the whole Spanish Pod team when they come to English Pod and discussing it with his team there, especially Esti who left him in the Cold.

There are things that comes and go but the cake, I just can not stop laughing.JAJAJAJA. and Leo nice happy birthday story, till your mum that there is a guy from Qatar that thanks her for helping him learning the language "Muchas Gracias por ella".

So..I think I'm grasping this

Last night I watched TV (period, end of story)Anoche vi la televisíon ~ preterito

Last night I was watching TV and eating ice cream (when something happened)...Anoche yo veía la televisíon y comía helado...~imperfecto

In college, I always watched David Letterman on TV. En la universidad, siempre veía David Letterman en la televisíon. (or kept watching or used to watch) ~ imperfecto

Es verdad?

Hola russ

Sí, lo que ha escrito es excelente.

También, se puede decir esto para enfatizar estas acciones continuas:

Anoche estaba viendo la televisión y estaba comiendo helado

JP, 

El lapiz es una explicación buena.  

Gracias!

Catherine, Chicago

Leo describes his 6th birthday party

era un día muy bonito

Marco describes his bad day

fue un día terrible

They are both descriptions, one using the imperfect and the other using the preterit - I cannot work out the difference, it may be to subtle for me.

maybe, Leo wants to savor the past in the present

  imperfect - past action important or continuing in the present

and Marco wants to cut it off and forget it.

   preterit - distinct action which is over and done.

Can I please build on Sponge67’s question?

Marco said “Fue un día terrible.”  If he continued the sentence so that the horrible day  was background for the events of the day would he have said “era un día”. 

For example

“(Era/fue)  un día terrible, perdí mi trabajo, me esposa me dejó y mi perro se morrión”

My guess is that in this case “era” is correct but I am amazed that after all this time the preterit and imperfect still can confuse me.

thx for the replies - i just found the link below which may also help - may be "Setting the scene or background"  as you say is the key and Marco just uses fue to describe the day in total and then goes on to set the scene with estábamos en mi casa

http://teachers.net/mentors/spanish/topic22626/8.13.09.13.13.19.html

sponge67

Thank you for the link

"Leo estaba vestido de Superman" is said in the video to be preterit, but I think you mean imperfect. The time on that is 3:06.

danielrkienitz

 yo estaba vestido de superman (2.40 ) is correctly referred to as the imperfect (i was dressed as) although, as you noticed,  at (3.08 ) the same phrase is referred to as the preterit (i dressed as)

 strangely what he fails to mention in this lesson is that what is usually known as "el preterito" is infact el pretérito indefinido or el pretérito perfecto simple as opposed to  el pertérit imperfecto. i.e. they are both preterit tenses.

Still, well spotted, I have no doubt that JP meant to say imperfect at 3.08 

I think this is a great video and will help make connections for some with whom the differences have not registered.  I always teach the imperfect as a "timeline in the past" and the preterite as a specific "hash mark" in the said timeline. 

Also, it can be helpful to think of the imperfect as "an ongoing movie in the past" and the preterite as a "snapshot or single foto in the past."

I find that for me personally, the biggest problem is thinking about it too much!  If I trust my gut, relying on what I know feels right, I rarely make mistakes with either. 

much as i enjoyed these videos I've always thought that this one missed a trick for that very reason. As a video it could have contrasted continuous action with still frames. using a slideshow to illustrate the imperfect strikes me as potentially confusing. the filmstrip analogy is the one that works best for me though i like the pencil  idea as well.

perhaps its an insignificant detail but i was long misled by explanations that focus on the action itself . It seems to me that the most important factor in choosing between the simple past and imperfect is personal choice. it simply depends how one wishes to present an action to ones interlocutor. 

Whether the action was short, long, repetitive habitual etc does not determine the choice of tense. You must decide which aspect of the action you wish to communicate.  turning on  a light is about as instantanious an action as one can imagine but i can still choose to say "i was turning on the light when..... or i would turn on the lights every day...i used to turn on the lights...

nor is it determined by how one percieves an event, the reason we dont need a simple present tense is that we always experience the length of new actions. leo could not experience his birthday party in the preterit. however from the vantage point of the present one can choose to communicate past events with a key descriptive frame or to replay the scene 

I am currently taking a spanish course and this short explanation has helped me more in 10 minutes than all the explanations of my teachers simply writing grammer rules on the board-thanks.

I would like to say the same as "bellybutton". Showing the grammar rules in such visual way is a super idea. Thanks!

You folks are crazy :-D I laughed a lot on these "face into the cake" examples. Great video!