Why is there more than one past tense in Spanish?

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I'm Timothy, and this is Learncraft Spanish.

This week we're going to learn all the rest of the common forms of ser and estar, including

the future tense, the conditional tense, and some unconjugated forms.

But to start out, we have to talk some more about the past tense.

So far, we've learned some past tense forms for both ser and estar.

In ser, these words all had a stressed syllable that sounds like er a eras eran and eramos in estar they all had the

stressed syllable stabb estabababas estab and estabamos. But there's another version of the past tense that

means something else. The version of the past tense that we've learned so far is what we call

the imperfect past. It's the most common type of past tense for both ser and estar, the tense that you'll use all the time.

But there's also something called the preterate past tense.

In fact, there are two different types of past tense for every verb in Spanish, which is not something that happens in English.

But in Spanish, it helps clarify some tricky situations. To illustrate why there would be two different versions of the past

tense in Spanish, let's tell a little story about your friend with the curly hair. Let's say that

you're still visiting the Estar magic shop, and this magic shop has a

merchandise area that we haven't visited yet. This is not far away from the stabby closet that

stored magic wands, and in this new prederate area, there are several red shelves where there

are assorted magic items such as gimmicky hats and pretend

potions. Now, suppose your friend on the hovercraft sees all this stuff and is very excited by it,

so he flies his hovercraft toward the red shelves a little too fast and ends up crashing into the corner, hitting his face against the corner of a shelf.

To make matters worse, the paint on these red shelves was still wet, so your friend comes away with red streaks all over his face and the

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