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Common Spanish Tenses
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Learn More About the Spanish Tenses
When learning to speak Spanish, it is important to get to grips with the different tenses. Indeed, understanding tenses will enable you to indicate whether actions or events have taken place in the past, are taking place in the present, or will take place in the future, which can be vitally important.
Nevertheless, there are several different tenses for each of these three time periods, and some do not correspond directly with English tenses, which can make it slightly confusing. To help you to develop your understanding, we have compiled a table of the main Spanish tenses, along with explanations and examples of when to use them.
| Name | Past, Present, or Future | When to use this Spanish tense | Frequency of use | Examples of use |
| Present / Presente | Present | Much like the present tense in English, the presente is used to describe actions in the present, facts or conditions that exist in the present, or to express how long something has been occurring. It can occasionally also be used to describe future actions, when that future time is specified. | High |
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| Present perfect / Pretérito perfecto | Past and Present | The pretérito perfecto corresponds with the English present perfect tense, and uses the present tense form of haber, followed by the past participle of the verb. It is primarily used to describe completed actions that took place in the past, but have present day implications. | High |
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| Imperfect / Pretérito imperfecto | Past | The pretérito imperfecto is used to describe past situations or habitual actions. It usually places an emphasis on the the progression of an action, but can also be used to give a more general description of a past setting, making it useful for storytelling purposes. | Medium |
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| Simple past / Pretérito indefinido | Past | The pretérito indefinido can be used to describe a completed past action that occurred only once, or when talking about a newly started action in the past, which interrupted another action. Additionally, it can describe a general truth, such as a completed past relationship. | High |
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| Past perfect / Pretérito pluscuamperfecto | Past | The past perfect tense, or pretérito pluscuamperfecto, is utilised when describing an event or action that occurred before another point in the past. For example, if you are telling a story in the simple past tense, but want to refer to an event even earlier, you would use the pretérito pluscuamperfecto. | High |
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| Past anterior / Pretérito anterior | Past | Although it is almost never used in conversation, the pretérito anterior does occasionally appear in literature and formal written works. It is similar to the pretérito pluscuamperfecto, but is used to express an action in the past, which took place immediately before another action in the past. | Low |
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| Simple future / Futuro simple | Future | Much like the simple future or future imperfect tense in other languages, we primarily use the futuro simple to express intentions for the future. With that said, it can also be used to make suppositions about the future and, more rarely, about the present. | High |
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| Future perfect / Futuro compuesto | Future | The futuro compuesto, sometimes referred to as the futuro perfecto, is used when expressing a supposition that an event or action will have taken place, either by the time of speaking, or by a specified time in the future. | Medium |
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