Spanish pasts?

[keenir]

a bit of background: my dad asked me to help him learn Spanish (practice with him, help him study, etc) so we can talk to a few of our neighbors {in more than just English}


For someone who is just starting out in speaking Spanish {non-Penninsular - no nostrotos/vostrotos}, is it neccessary to know the difference between the two(?) pasts? The pasts were explained to me as this:
1. I've completed doing something.
2. I finished something yesterday.

Not knowing better, I suggested this as sample statements to use in my dad's {the learner in question's} studying:
1. "I just finished jogging."
2. "I went jogging yesterday." I figured that, if nothing else, the use of yesterday would help distinguish them in his mind.

......but the response I got was that he needed to know which had the imperfect, the pluperfect, etc.



Any help and suggestions/advice are greatly appreciated.

[Travis B.]

(Note that I do not speak Spanish, so take the following with a grain of salt.)

The preterite and imperfect, from what I know, differ in aspect, i.e. the preterite is perfective and the imperfect is, well, imperfective. Not distinguishing the two is like not distinguishing the past and the past continuous in English, and in English this is an important distinction to make.

[zompist]

a bit of background: my dad asked me to help him learn Spanish (practice with him, help him study, etc) so we can talk to a few of our neighbors {in more than just English}

For someone who is just starting out in speaking Spanish {non-Penninsular - no nostrotos/vostrotos}, is it neccessary to know the difference between the two(?) pasts? The pasts were explained to me as this:
1. I've completed doing something.
2. I finished something yesterday.

Er, those both sound like the same thing (a completive). Plus there's three past forms.

The easiest is the imperfective, which is very much like the English past progressive. "Leía el libro" = "I was reading the book": I was engaged in the activity of reading, with no implication that I finished.

The perfect is, well, a perfect: "He leído el libro" = "I've read the book". I went over this just now with my wife (a native Spanish speaker), and she explained it as a past action with continuing significance, which is the textbook definition of a perfect, as opposed to a perfective. An example might be that someone wants me to read a book in Spanish. I point to one and say "He leído este libro"-- "I've read this book." A perfect almost always has an implication-- in this case "... therefore I don't need to read another one." Going over a few examples, our English and Spanish usages didn't exactly match, but this is still a good place to start.

The preterite is unmarked past-- "Leí el libro" = "I read the book". Because there are two other tenses you could have used, it's often contrastive-- i.e. the action is complete (it's not imperfective) and its relevance isn't being asserted (it's not perfect). But it's also unmarked, so there isn't a guarantee that it's completive or imperfect.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I recollect that the imperfect is also used for habitual or repeated actions in the past, and that the imperfect is used for an action that was ongoing that was interrupted by another action, the interrupting action being in the preterite.

[Travis B.]

I recollect that the imperfect is also used for habitual or repeated actions in the past, and that the imperfect is used for an action that was ongoing that was interrupted by another action, the interrupting action being in the preterite.

Habitual and iterative aspects are subcategories of imperfective aspects other than continuous/progressive aspects. It just happens that English does not merge these aspects together into a singular grammaticalized imperfective aspect.

[vegfarandi]

There's also the acabar de past which is sort of distended present, like using "just" in English, i.e. a very immediate past tense:

acabo de leer = I just read/just finished reading

[Linguoboy]

It's also worth noting that there's considerable variation in usage of the perfect in the Spanish-speaking world, mirroring--imperfectly!--the variation in the English-speaking world. Penny goes into this in detail in his Variation and change in Spanish, but essentially perfect usage is most extensive in north central and northeastern Spain and declines as you go west and south. Since Latin American varieties were historically drawn chiefly from the dialects of southern Spain and the Canaries, they show much more extensive use of the preterite than the standardised Castilian of Spain.

(To give one example, the Spanish I speak is mostly Peninsular (and influenced by Catalan) and I still remember being flummoxed by having a Mexican cashier ask me "¿Cómo fue su día?" It was lunchtime, so my day wasn't even half over. Just as in English I expect "How has your day been?" in that context, in Spanish I would have expected "¿Cómo ha estado su día?")

[Talskubilos]

(To give one example, the Spanish I speak is mostly Peninsular (and influenced by Catalan) and I still remember being flummoxed by having a Mexican cashier ask me "¿Cómo fue su día?" It was lunchtime, so my day wasn't even half over. Just as in English I expect "How has your day been?" in that context, in Spanish I would have expected "¿Cómo ha estado su día?")

In that expression, the verb ser is used instead of estar: ¿Cómo ha sido su día?, but I'd say instead: ¿Qué tal le ha ido hoy? o ¿Qué tal le fue ayer?, with respectively the past perfect and the indefinite forms of the verb ir 'to go'.

[Kuchigakatai]

(To give one example, the Spanish I speak is mostly Peninsular (and influenced by Catalan) and I still remember being flummoxed by having a Mexican cashier ask me "¿Cómo fue su día?" It was lunchtime, so my day wasn't even half over. Just as in English I expect "How has your day been?" in that context, in Spanish I would have expected "¿Cómo ha estado su día?")

Well, I would be very flummoxed by that use of "fue" too... and I'm from El Salvador. My first thought hearing that from a Mexican person would be that they're a heritage speaker saying something strange...

I'd personally say ¿Cómo le va?, or, ¿Qué tal le va hoy?.

[kodé]

Going over a few examples, our English and Spanish usages didn't exactly match, but this is still a good place to start.

The preterite is unmarked past-- "Leí el libro" = "I read the book". Because there are two other tenses you could have used, it's often contrastive-- i.e. the action is complete (it's not imperfective) and its relevance isn't being asserted (it's not perfect). But it's also unmarked, so there isn't a guarantee that it's completive or imperfect.

I’m not surprised by the fact that your English and Spanish perfects didn’t completely line up. Perfects are notoriously hard to pin down across languages, and they display a dizzying variety of shades of meaning. I remember in a class on aspect I heard that “I have eaten yesterday” sounds fine in German, but it sounds terrible to English speakers (myself included). Then you get a whole bunch of spin-off uses of the perfect in different languages: mirativity (sort of like surprise), resultativity, imchoativity … and while in some languages perfects seem to be similar to perfectives in the sense of completion, in other languages they’re closer to *progressives*. Wild stuff.

I am surprised by the pretérito being unmarked though; I had always thought it was a past perfective. Is it sort of like the English simple past then, where it typically implies completion (because otherwise you would have used a different tense), but in some situations it doesn’t make any such implication?

It's also worth noting that there's considerable variation in usage of the perfect in the Spanish-speaking world, mirroring--imperfectly!--the variation in the English-speaking world. Penny goes into this in detail in his Variation and change in Spanish, but essentially perfect usage is most extensive in north central and northeastern Spain and declines as you go west and south. Since Latin American varieties were historically drawn chiefly from the dialects of southern Spain and the Canaries, they show much more extensive use of the preterite than the standardised Castilian of Spain.

(To give one example, the Spanish I speak is mostly Peninsular (and influenced by Catalan) and I still remember being flummoxed by having a Mexican cashier ask me "¿Cómo fue su día?" It was lunchtime, so my day wasn't even half over. Just as in English I expect "How has your day been?" in that context, in Spanish I would have expected "¿Cómo ha estado su día?")

Having mostly spoken Californian Mexican Spanish (as an L2), I can attest that the perfective is much more common than the perfect at least in California. If I heard “ha sido” I’d be confused, though FWIW like Talskubilos and Kuchigakatai, I wouldn’t actually expect a form of ‘ser’ or ‘estar’ at all in this context.

[Linguoboy]

I remember in a class on aspect I heard that “I have eaten yesterday” sounds fine in German, but it sounds terrible to English speakers (myself included).

Much of Germany has gone as far as France in banning the preterite from the colloquial language. Where I was in southwest Germany, it was common even for "ist gewesen" (dialect form: isch gsii) to replace "war" ("was").

I tend to apply Catalan rules when speaking Spanish, even though I know they don't line up perfectly, since I find them less confusing.

[Raphael]

I remember in a class on aspect I heard that “I have eaten yesterday” sounds fine in German, but it sounds terrible to English speakers (myself included).

Ok, to be pedantic, strictly speaking it would have to be something like "I have yesterday eaten".

[Torco]

there is enourmous variation in the way different countries and cultures within the hispanosphere use tense and aspect and all of that: for example, spaniards (at least in mallorca, but I gather it's the same in the rest of spain) use "he salido" as distinct from "salí" implying he salido not only being perfect, but also relatively recent, as in 'he salido hace cuatro años a buscar pan' would be wrong, I'm told. he salido to me has more of a habitual vibe, as in 'ive been going out lately'. 'cómo fue su dia' is a bit weirder, and could be derived from english 'how was your day'. this is common, though not ubiquitous, in the latin american countries near the states: I've literally been told 'te llamo patrá' < te llamo para atrás < i (will) call you back.

[Linguoboy]

there is enourmous variation in the way different countries and cultures within the hispanosphere use tense and aspect and all of that: for example, spaniards (at least in mallorca, but I gather it's the same in the rest of spain) use "he salido" as distinct from "salí" implying he salido not only being perfect, but also relatively recent, as in 'he salido hace cuatro años a buscar pan' would be wrong, I'm told.

As I mentioned above, usage is not uniform in Spain. In fact, one of the reasons why Latin America differs so much from the Peninsular standard (based as it is on the varieties of northern Spain) is that the New World was populated largely by people originating in the south and west of Spain (e.g. Extremadura, Andalucia, the Canary Islands) or who spent considerable time there (since ships sailing to the New World originated mostly in Cádiz and stopped in the Canaries to take on provisions) and these happen to be the places where use of the perfect is weakest. Mallorca, however, is historically not Spanish-speaking but Catalan-speaking and it wouldn't surprise me to find that usage of the perfect there mirrors its usage in Catalan (where the simple rule we were taught was "If it happened today, use the perfect").

I think it's worth noting that Spain fits into a larger Europe-wide pattern with the center of innovation (i.e. the use of the perfect for the widest range of situations) situated in France. As you move away from there, you find relic areas where preterite forms dominate (e.g. Northern Germany, Southern Italy, Southern Spain). I'm not sure about variation in usage within the UK, but I do know that historically usage of the Irish perfect construction was very limited (basically only when expressing immediate past and then only for a subset of verbs) and that this carried over into Hiberno-English. Usage in current Irish English appears to be closer to the UK standard, which in turn is leading to an expansion of the perfect construction in Irish.

[Creyeditor]

Just wanted to mention that Northern Germany is quickly shifting away from preterite forms. For me the choice is largely lexical. Most psych-verbs and modals only allow preterite and never perfect, whereas other lexical verbs only take the perfect and never preterite.

[hwhatting]

Just wanted to mention that Northern Germany is quickly shifting away from preterite forms. For me the choice is largely lexical. Most psych-verbs and modals only allow preterite and never perfect, whereas other lexical verbs only take the perfect and never preterite.

IMD, it's more complicated than that and it's not simply lexical (although I agree that psych & modal use the simple past more often than other verbs). The reason may be that I'm older (I'm 55) and my idiolect is probably closer to the written standard than that of the average Northern speaker.
IIRC, Weeping Elf and I both gave detailed descriptions of our usage of simple past vs.perfect somewhere on the old board; but I don't have time to search for that now.

[keenir]

(not sure if this is the right thread for this; apologies if its not; its a little funny though, right? is there a thread for humorous language-related incidents?)



My dad's learning Spanish to talk to his neighbors, but doing it mostly with conjugation tables and Google Translate; today, when he asked me to find a conjugation table to show him the difference between toma and tome, I used his Google Translate to make a list of phrases that showed what appeared to be a difference (and below them, on the paper i copied them to, i jotted that one appears to be slightly more insisting than the other - when it says "take a seat," it appears to, based on the others, it seems to be urging the listener to sit down...

My dad was a little upset there was no conjugation table, and said as much.

What I nearly replied to him, was "You keep telling me to try only looking for things we'd use in conversation; what you asked for would've been like me asking for the consonant root of chutzpah."

took me five minutes to realize that that'd be chutzpah in itself, asking that.
(or so i think)