In response to Talking about the Past
The Spanish language has two ways to talk in the past tense: the preterite and the imperfect. The verb forms are simple to learn, but distinguishing between the two can be tricky. The preterite is used for completed actions in the past, or things that happened in a specific amount of time. The imperfect is used for ongoing actions, descriptions of events, and feelings.
The really tricky part is mixing them together. It’s easy to get confused when talking about an event and then describing that same event. I’m never quite sure which form to use.
I can say that reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in Spanish has helped me with this a bit. It’s helped me with all the verb tenses, actually. And believe me, there are a lot of them. It almost seems like everything is a verb tense when it comes to Spanish.