Spanish Imperfect Tense: How to Say "Used To" in Spanish

"When I was a kid, we used to visit my grandmother every summer. She always made lemonade, and the house smelled like fresh bread." Every verb in that little memory lives in one Spanish tense: the imperfect. It's the tense of memories, habits, and descriptions — and here's the secret nobody leads with: it's the easiest past tense to conjugate in all of Spanish.

After 40 years of teaching English speakers, I've seen students brace for the past tense like it's a wall — usually because the preterite met them first, with its pile of irregular verbs. The imperfect is the opposite experience: two sets of endings, exactly three irregular verbs, and one clear job — describing how things were. Let's build it from zero.

The big pictureWhat the imperfect is for

English doesn't have an imperfect tense, so it spreads the same work across phrases like used to, would always, and was doing. Spanish bundles all of that into one tense with four core jobs:

• Habitual or repeated past actions — anything you "used to" do: Íbamos a la playa cada verano. (We used to go to the beach every summer.)
• Descriptions and background — weather, age, feelings, time, what the scene looked like: Hacía frío y la casa estaba en silencio. (It was cold and the house was silent.)
• Ongoing actions interrupted by another action — the "was doing… when" pattern: Estaba cocinando cuando llamaste. (I was cooking when you called.)
• Age and time in the past — always imperfect, no exceptions: Tenía 8 años. Eran las dos. (I was 8 years old. It was two o'clock.)

Notice the common thread: none of these actions has a clear beginning or end. The imperfect doesn't report events — it paints the scene the events happen in. Keep that image in mind; it will carry you through this entire guide.

Conjugation nº 1Regular -AR verbs

Drop the -ar, add the endings. That's the entire lesson. Here's hablar (to speak):

One accent to remember: hablábamos. Everything else is bare -aba endings.

One thing jumps out immediately: the yo form and the él/ella/usted form are identical — both are hablaba. Spanish relies on context to tell them apart, or simply adds the pronoun: yo hablaba, ella hablaba. You'll see this same twin pattern in every imperfect verb in the language, so get comfortable with it now.

Conjugation nº 2Regular -ER and -IR verbs

Here's where the imperfect starts being generous: -er and -ir verbs share exactly the same endings. Learn one set and you've covered both. Here are comer (to eat) and vivir (to live):

Every -er/-ir imperfect form carries an accent on the í. No exceptions.

Same twin pattern as before: comía is both "I ate" and "he/she ate." And notice the accented -ía running through every form — that sound is the signature of the imperfect. If you can say comía, vivía, tenía, quería, you already sound like someone telling a story in Spanish.

The best news in SpanishOnly 3 irregular verbs (seriously)

The present tense has stem changes hiding everywhere. The preterite has dozens of irregulars. The imperfect has exactly three irregular verbs in the entire language: ser, ir, and ver. Here they are, complete:

Ver barely counts — it just keeps the e: veía instead of vía.

And era may be the single most useful word in this whole article — it shows up in nearly every past-tense sentence you'll ever build: era niño, era tarde, era mi profesor. If you want SER laid out in every tense in one place, my full SER conjugation guide has you covered.

The key phraseSaying "used to": imperfect + solía

English needs the phrase "used to" to mark past habits. Spanish gives you two ways to say it — and one of them requires no extra words at all:

1. The plain imperfect. The meaning is built into the tense: Vivíamos en Chicago already means "We used to live in Chicago." No helper words needed.
2. SOLER (imperfect) + infinitive. When you want to spotlight the habit itself, conjugate soler in the imperfect — solía, solías, solía, solíamos, solíais, solían — and add an infinitive: Solíamos ir a la playa. (We used to go to the beach.)

Both are completely natural. In everyday speech the plain imperfect does most of the work; solía adds a touch of "that was our custom," which makes it perfect for nostalgia. One caution: soler in this meaning lives only in the present and the imperfect — don't try to force it into other past tenses.

The big decisionImperfect vs preterite: which past do you need?

Spanish has two simple past tenses, and choosing between them is the real skill — not the conjugating. The good news is that the contrast follows a logic you already use in English:

Watch both tenses working together inside a single sentence:

This decision is important enough that the other half deserves its own deep dive — the endings, the irregular hall of shame, and plenty more scene-vs-event practice. Read the complete guide to the Spanish preterite tense next, and the Spanish past stops being a coin flip.

ShortcutsTrigger words that signal the imperfect

Certain time expressions almost always travel with the imperfect, because they describe repetition or open-ended time. When you hear one, your imperfect radar should light up:

• siempre (always) — Siempre llegaba tarde. (He always arrived late.)
• todos los días (every day) — Estudiaba todos los días. (I used to study every day.)
• cada verano (every summer) — Cada verano visitábamos a mi abuela. (Every summer we visited my grandmother.)
• de niño / cuando era niño (as a kid / when I was a kid) — De niño, tenía un perro. (As a kid, I had a dog.)
• mientras (while) — Mientras cocinaba, escuchaba música. (While I cooked, I listened to music.)
• generalmente (usually) — Generalmente comíamos a las dos. (We usually ate at two.)

These aren't ironclad rules — context always wins — but as a beginner, betting on the imperfect after any of these expressions puts you on the right side of the odds nearly every time.