What was that? Ser has a predet tense?

Join us on a rigorous step-by-step journey to fluency. I'm Timothy, and this is Learncraft Spanish.

As we've explored our first five verbs, we've learned the imperfect forms of all of them, as well as some

of the predurate forms of ester, tenere, and ir. And as we learned back in episode 31, the

prederate tends to be used specifically when you're describing some sort of event or something that had a specific

duration in the past. Ser, meanwhile, doesn't tend to use the prederate much because normally when

you're talking about what something was or who someone was in the past, it's not much of an

event. Instead, it's not much of an event.

Instead, it's just a general fact about the general past.

For example, we were friends.

However, sometimes being something is an event with a specific duration. That would likely be the case for the following sentences. It was a mistake. He was the winner. Or she was the first.

In each of these cases, you'd use the word foe.

Now, we already learned the word foe as the word for he, she, or it, went as the prederate of ir.

But as bizarre as this is, the fact is that ser and ir have the same predurate tense forms. All five of the ir peterates that we learned,

fui, fue, fiste, feroon, and fimos, can indicate the past tense of either ir or ser.

So here's another example.

I was the one that helped you that day.

I was the one that helped you that day.

I was the who helped that day.

I was the who helped that day. I was the help you the day. Now again, normally these words that start with F are forms of iir, which is an action verb and lends itself to much more frequent use of the preterate tense. For ser in the past, you'll normally use the

air words, eran, eras, and eramos. But using these F words as a part of ser is something that

happens on occasion, so you'll want to be prepared for it. As an example of where this might be confusing, check out this sentence.

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