I am terribly confused:
I am trying to learn Spanish and I am bewildered by the terms “I was, temporarily, unfinished event,” "he was (temporarily, finished event), “she was, (permanently, unfinished,” and “they were, (permanently, finished event.” Can someone please explain?
It may be a bit difficult to explain as english is not my native language, but to put it simply, in spanish, you have two different verbs to translate “to be”, and different past tenses.
First, the translation of “to be”: if you mean “to be” as a permanent state, it would be “ser”. If you mean “to be” as a temporary state, it would be “estar”.
As for the past, I’m less confident about that one since I studied spanish quite a long time ago. I would say that you can either use simple past for finished event or imperfect for description or long events. Maybe I’m missing one tense in this case…
Hi @daisy2chain,
Which course(s) are you taking? In A1 Spanish, http://www.memrise.com/course/618832/a1-spanish/ you may find the examples in Levels 68 to 75 helpful.
I made myself this note as a memory aid to help with the different past tenses of ‘to be’:
TEMPORARY UNFINISHED – was, were, where or how – with unspecified time – example: “I was ill” = Estaba enfermo.
TEMPORARY FINISHED – was, were, where or how – with specified time – example: “I was in Spain yesterday” = Estuve en España ayer.
PERMANENTLY UNFINISHED – what or when – with unspecified time - example: “I was a teacher” = Era maestro.
PERMANENTLY FINISHED – what or when – with specified time – example: “I was a teacher for 10 years” = Fui maestro durante diez años.
Hope this helps
Thank you.
Thank you.
Just one thing, alanh,
I thank you for your help in trying to explain the differences in the various past tenses in Spanish,
however I noticed some exceptions, which perhaps you can help me with:
Your example: TEMPORARY UNFINISHED – was, were, where or how – with unspecified time – example: “I was in Spain” = Estaba en España.
Their example: TEMPORARY UNFINISHED - was, were, where or how – with unspecified time –
“She was in the park” = Estuvo en el parque." I wrote “Estaba en el parque” and they said that it was wrong, yet, according to your notes, it would have been right. After all, they write “estábamos listos para comer” - “we were ready to eat.”
Please help.
well, the English is not very clear as well… “She was in the park” could mean “she went to the park” or “she was (at that time) in the park”… so… the user thinks: what should I put here? estaba? estuve? fue???
Sorry @daisy2chain . I have had a similar problem with that one, and find those past tenses difficult to master, too.
I have done some digging to try to find some clearer guidance. Do either of these help?
or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgI2Q3G9GxU
To remove the confusion, I´ll change my “estaba” example to “I was ill = estaba enfermo”
Thank you. Hdxroptere.
Thank you, alanh. I tried the “Quora” website but it doesnnot open on my tablet or computer desktop.
Try this one.
If it still doesn’t open, try right clicking on it and then on “open the link in a new tab”.
How about the YouTube video? Did that play OK for you?
I strongly recommend buying a copy of Barron’s 501 Verbs for these sorts of questions. That book has multiple examples that can help make sense of the different tenses and usages. Instead of looking for a “rule” expressed in Engilsh, or a translation to match, you can compare your overall situation or context to examples, and find the most similar relationship between verb, subject, context. It’s still not exact, because there can be subtle nuances, but it’s better than trying to find a short rule.
Sometimes it depends subtly on the context: “She was in the park” is different from “She used to be in the park”, and also different from “She was in the park when she decided to…”
I’m a native Spanish speaker. Here’s my understanding.
A basic rule of thumb would be to use «ser» for things that touch the core of your being, otherwise use «estar». That’s why usually permanent stuff is described with «ser» and contingent stuff is described with «estar». Let’s look at a few examples:
Estoy en la playa: I’m at the beach. You’re at the beach right now. As much as you’d want it to be, it’s not an inherent trait of yours and even if it is, there’s really no exception I can think of: you don’t use ser to describe where you are.
Soy de Madrid: I’m from Madrid. Now here you use ser because you’re describing your origins, where you come from. You might or might not care about it, but it’s still a piece of information about yourself as an individual. Plus, you can’t change it like you can change being at the playa.
Estoy aburrida: I’m bored. I’m bored right now. Even if you’ve been in a state of boredom for a couple of years, you’d say estoy aburrida, because there’s this general assumption that you could populate other states of mind. If you’ve lived bored your whole life, you might say vivo aburrida or he vivido aburrida toda mi vida, but never soy aburrida.
Soy aburrida: I’m a boring person. And this is why. When you use soy+a state, it implies it’s not a state of mind but a personal caracteristic –you are that state in a way, you’re describing yourself as a person who has that characteristic, the information you’re giving is egosyntonic (it’s consistent with your own self-image).
Estoy comiendo: We’re having lunch. This one is pretty straightforward. Here, estar is acting as an auxiliary verb. It literally means “the thing I’m doing now is eating”. You’d never say «soy comiendo». With some poetic licence that would translate as “I live, I reafirm my existence in the world, when I eat”, which is a weird thing to say anyway.
Soy Marta: I’m Marta. That’s another straightforward example. Your name is the way you refer to your own identity, of course you’re going to use ser!
Soy del Adleti: I support the Adleti team. Yep, we’d use ser here, too. (I know, yeah, we’re obsessed with soccer)
Estoy casado: I’m married. You’d think we’d use ser here, but no, you’re describing your marital status and of course it’s less important than your soccer team.
Estoy saliendo con Pedro: I’m dating Pedro. Well if being married is not a permanent state, dating someone is as fickle as my attention span.
Soy su madre: I’m her/his mother: setting aside custody disputes, there’s no changing who your mother is. Ser.
Estoy fea: I look ugly. Okay, we’ve all woken up one morning after having too much vino, looked at ourselves in the mirror and called the police because there’s a monster home. No? No? I’m alone… Anyway, it’s not permanent, or at least we try to convey that with our language.
Soy fea: I’m ugly (as a permanent trait). But you know when you’re talking with your depressed friend who’s just gone through a break up and she says, looking at the sky “I’m just so ugly…”. She’d probably use ser in that scenario, because she’d be describing a trait she believes is inherent to her.
Estoy jodido: I’m screwed
Estoy de pie: I’m standing up
As you can see, you can follow some general rules, but you’ll still have to hear it a lot to get it 100% of the time right. I was born into Spanish, but I imagine it’d be quite hard otherwise.
-Imperfect (Estaba): it’s imperfect because it’s vague, it doesn’t really indicate whether the action is finished or ongoing and it’s not too specific as to the time it happened. You use it to talk about past habits, when you’re telling a story (“I was (estaba) playing the ukelele when a tiger came…”), for past details (it was (estaba) raining, I (estaba) was angry and the world had decided to…), to just generally convey information in the past as an explanation (I was (estaba) tired)…
-Simple past perfect (Estuve): It’s always a finished action, estuve conveys there was a start, a state and an end to that state all in the past, and also that it happened at a specific point in time, even when you don’t explicitly say when. Btw, that tiger which appeared when you were in the middle of playing the ukelele did it in the simple past perfect, and left your ukelele playing unfinished and imperfect. Blame the tiger.
-Past perfect (He estado). This pretty much is the same as the English to have been. It’s also always a finished action, normally closer in time than the simple past perfect version. However, sometimes we use it because we want to bring something from the past to the present, like when you’re talking about an experience you’ve been through (in the past, maybe the distant past) which you remember vividly or from which you learned something (the point is that it’s still relevant today).
-Pluperfect (Había estado). This is the past of the past. The best way to understand it is in a story. Imagine you’re telling a story in past tense («Laura was looking through the window, thinking about everything that had happened the past year…»). To refer to a point in the past that happened before Laura was looking through the window, in English you’d use the past perfect. In Spanish the past perfect always goes back from the present, so since Laura is already in the past, we need a different verb form: the pluperfect, which goes back already starting from a past point in time. Anyway don’t worry too much about it for now.
Sorry if this ended up being too long. Hope it helps!
This is really helpful, @migarisa! Thank you so much for going to the trouble of setting it out so clearly. I enjoyed the humour, too. 
I’m going to print a copy and keep it by me.
I’m also going to check those examples in Levels 68 to 75 of the A1 Spanish course to see if they stand up.
Thanks again!
Thank you, migarisa. Just one problem:
What is temporary, finished or permanently, unfinished as is described in Spanish A1?
Having said this, what about the verb “fue?”, e.g. “I was young once,” “Fui joven una vez?”
My understanding, given what others have answered, would be that temporary, finished is estar in the simple past perfect and permanently, unfinished is ser in the imperfect tense. Therefore:
Temporary, finished:
Yo estuve
Tú estuviste
Él/Ella/Usted estuvo
Nosotros/as estuvimos
Vosotros/as estuvisteis
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes estuvieron
Permanently, unfinished:
Yo era
Tú eras
Él/Ella/Usted era
Nosotros/as éramos
Vosotros/as erais
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes eran
But I’ve never studied Spanish A1 (obviously), so I might be wrong. Anyway, I just checked the course @alanh mentioned and that’s what they’d equate to there.
Gotta say I find the descriptions such as “permanently unfinished” kind of funny. Read it like that and it would seem when you say “yo era”, you’re permanently trapped in the vortex of your own actions, unable to ever change course again. But I guess it means that when you say “yo era”, you’re talking about something you were, not something that just happened to you, and you’re referencing the moment in which you were in the active state of being that thing, not just saying “oh yeah I was that, but then I was done with it” (which would be a permanent event in this terminology).
Almost forgot the last question. “Fue” is actually the verb ser in permanently finished tense (simple past perfect). I know, there’s irregular verbs and then there’s ser, but we’re not changing our language at this point 
The permanently, finished tense actually conveys that idea of “once, I was…” precisely because it’s finished: you were X and then you stopped being X.
Permanently, finished
Yo fui
Tú fuiste
Él/Ella/Usted fue
Nosotros/as fuimos
Vosotros/as fuisteis
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes fueron
And just for completion, I’ll add the temporary, unfinished tense:
Temporary, unfinished
Yo estaba
Tú estabas
Él/Ella/Usted estaba
Nosotros/as estábamos
Vosotros/as estabais
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes estaban
Thank you, migarisa. Maybe one day I will understand those Spanish tenses better.
One more point: you know that most verbs end in “o” for the first person: e.g. “vivo” - “I live” and “e” for the third person: “vive” - “he or she lives?”
Please take heed: “estuve” - “I was”, “estuvo” - “he or she was.” Did you notice?
Incidentally, it is only the “temporary, finished” and “permanently, unfinished” tenses that I find difficult to understand. The rest I can understand.
Thanks anyway.
I think it’s because irregular preterit verbs have to be treated that way.
I found the following site, which has what looks like some helpful explanations and exercises. I have linked to the “ser vs estar in the past tense” page but the “conjugation” pages are worth a look, too!
@migarisa - thanks very much for your additional helpful explanations. 
I cannot get the website to function on my computer. Can you please help me?
What, if anything, are you seeing when you click on the link? Do you see this page:
What do you get if you type “spanishgrammarlessons.com” into your search engine? Do you see this highlighted entry?
