Beginning Spanish ¡Empecemos por aquí!

232 •  Chapter 3: La cultura y los viajes • say good-bye * Notice this does not necessarily require the preterite. Focus on successful communication rather than trying to manipulate the conversation to force preterite practice. Listen to an excerpt of a sample conversation here: https://​drive​.google​.com/​file/​d/​1TvZVpuNHSEvwVEx8B2xDV7qAZ5olYZdB/​view​?usp​=​sharing. Access the transcript here: https://​docs​.google​.com/​document/​d/​11siaVtrZdteZx9mCpAVN​-hGp3bvJ9NEciZYAnGPBDeo/​edit​ ?usp​=​sharing. Before you begin, use this space to write some questions you can ask your partner. 1. __________________________________________________________ 2. __________________________________________________________ 3. __________________________________________________________ 4. __________________________________________________________ 5. __________________________________________________________ Lengua 3.5: Regular preterite tense conjugation The preterite is one of the verb tenses used for speaking about the past. Specifically, the preterite is for actions and events that occurred. We use the preterite in response to the question, “What happened?” The other common past tense is the imperfect, and we will learn it in a later Lengua section. For now, it is important to know that we cannot use the preterite to describe what things were like; it is only for what happened. We will most often use it when narrating events in the past. For a review of regular present tense conjugation, or conjugation in general, you can look back over Lengua 1.5. Just as with present tense, conjugating a verb in the preterite means finding its stem and then adding the verb ending that corresponds with the subject. The verb endings in the preterite are different from the present tense endings. In the preterite, however, the endings for -er verbs are the same as those for -ir verbs. Here is the conjugation for regular preterite verbs, using tomar , responder , and abrir as examples: