Beginning Spanish ¡Empecemos por aquí!

402 •  Chapter 5: Nuestro pasado 10. (imaginar) ¿Alguna vez _________________________vivir en otra época? ¿En qué periodo te gustaría vivir y por qué? Learning objectives check, Lengua 5.3: Present perfect tense ❏ I understand how the present perfect tense is used. ❏ I can select the correct form of haber based on the subject of a sentence. ❏ I can almost always correctly form past participles of familiar verbs, including some common irregular ones. ❏ I can recognize and understand present perfect verbs when I read or hear them. ❏ In writing, I can use present perfect verbs to express experiences that I have had. Lengua 5.4:Verbs to illustrate the preterite tense concept As we continue discussing experiences in the past, it is important to know that we will need both the preterite and the imperfect verb tenses in order to fully express ourselves in past tense. We will study the imperfect tense soon, but first we will explore a handful of verbs that stand out as examples of how the preterite tense works. In some texts, these verbs are presented as “verbs that change meaning” in the preterite and imper- fect. In reality, they do not change meaning; it is simply that their preterite and imperfect uses are different enough that it seems as if they were different verbs. In general terms, the preterite expresses something that happened . It cannot merely describe what things were like. The imperfect tense, as we will see in a later Lengua section, describes what was going on, what used to occur, or what things were like. In this Lengua section, we will look at the verbs saber , conocer , poder , querer , tener , and tener que in the preterite tense. This is an opportunity to improve our understanding of the preterite before we begin to use the imperfect. Saber In the present tense, saber expresses knowledge and ability: Sé la respuesta. Sé hablar alemán. In the past tense, these would be “I knew the answer” and “I knew how to speak German.” Neither one of those is an action; that kind of knowledge is ongoing. To express those ideas, we would need the imper- fect tense (which we will learn in a later Lengua section). In the preterite, we are taking the concept of knowledge and applying it to something that happened. Thus saber in the preterite means “to find out” or “to discover”; it is the action of knowledge. Cuando leí las noticias, supe los resultados de la elección. ¿Cómo supiste que no hay clase mañana?