Preterite Indicative

Now we will take a look into the past. You might think that the past tense is called ‘the past tense’ – but I’m afraid you would be wrong. For some reason, grammarians (that’s what you call the nutters who make this stuff up) have decided to call it ‘the preterite’ or ‘preterite indicative’, or if they're feeling kind, just ‘the simple past’.

By the way, Americans sometimes spell this as ‘preterit’ without a final ‘e’ – this American spelling reflects the correct pronunciation: it should be pronounced ‘pret-er-rit’ not ‘pret-er-right’. The word preterite is derived from the Latin ‘praeteritum’ meaning ‘past’ (grammarians just luuurve Latin).

The concept is very similar to using the present tense – you just have to learn the new conjugations. There are actually several ways to refer to something that happened in the past, each with varying shades of meaning, and the preterite represents just one of these ways. To give you an example of what I mean, take a look at the following sentences:

I walked home.

I was walking home.

I have walked home.

I had walked home.

I would have walked home.

Each of these sentences describes something involving the past, but they carry different shades of meaning by employing different tenses. The preterite is the simplest of these, that is, the first example above ‘I walked home’. It refers to someone or something directly having done something (he ran, they ate, we went, etc.). For regular verbs, this means using a different set of endings on the stem of the infinitive. The following examples of regular Portuguese verbs illustrate the full conjugation of the preterite tense.

Here are some examples of irregular preterites:

No, it's not a misprint. The preterite forms of the verbs ‘ser’ and ‘ir’ are identical. So to say ‘I was’ (‘eu fui’), is exactly the same as to say ‘I went’ (‘eu fui’). Strange, but true.

Interestingly, the preterite is used even for negative statements in Portuguese – we don’t do this in English. For example, to put ‘I thought’ into the negative, we would say ‘I did not think’. Because we use ‘did’ (an auxiliary verb), we have to change ‘thought’ to ‘think’ (the infinitive). Portuguese is a lot simpler. ‘I did not think’ would be translated ‘não pensei’ (lit. ‘not I thought’), which is much more logical, and does not require you to change the verb form or use any auxiliary verbs. That’s why you sometimes hear Portuguese people who are learning English say things like ‘I didn’t thought’.