How to Use the Past Progressive in Spanish

The past progressive refers to actions that were taking place at some point in the past.

For example, in English, you’d say something like “The little girl was talking to her friend on the phone yesterday.”

Spanish has a similar grammatical concept.

So what is the Spanish past progressive, how do you form it and when do you use it?

Read on to harness the power of the past progressive in Spanish!

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The Past Progressive Pattern

Let’s look at a few examples of the past progressive in English and translate them into Spanish.

What were you doing? → ¿Qué estabas haciendo?

I was telling her that… → Estaba diciéndole que…

She was looking at Sam. → Ella estaba mirando a Sam.

She was crying. → Ella estaba llorando.

Do you notice the pattern in the Spanish translations?

You might be able to spot it even if you’re new to learning Spanish and don’t recognize the verb endings yet.

It may look complicated at first, but the Spanish past progressive is as easy as its English counterpart. The following sections will teach you how to form it, step by step.

How to Form the Spanish Past Progressive Tense

1. Imperfect tense of  estar

If you’re learning the past progressive tense, you’re probably already familiar with the Spanish present progressive. If not, I recommend you review the present progressive in Spanish before you proceed.

As you know, when forming the Spanish present progressive tense, you have to take the present tense of the verb estar (to be).

To form the past progressive, you need to conjugate the imperfect tense of the same verb according to its corresponding Spanish pronoun:

The verb estar is regular in the imperfect tense, so this should not be difficult to learn.

2. Gerundio

Next, we need the Spanish gerundio (gerund).

Depending on the ending of the infinitive, regular verbs can fall into one of two groups: those that end in -ar and those that end in -er or -ir.

Infinitives ending in -ar

Remove -ar and add -ando:

Infinitives ending in -er and -ir

Remove -er or -ir and add -iendo:

As for irregular verbs, it would be outside the scope of this post to include all the possible irregularities and infinitives. You can find a long list of irregular gerundios at Learn a Language.

Here are just a few of the most common irregulars:

3. The past progressive: estar + gerundio

Now that we know how to get the different components of the past progressive, the only thing we have to do is put them together and make sentences.

Have a look at some examples:

Easy! As you can see, the English and the Spanish past progressive tenses are quite similar.

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As you watch and listen to these tenses in action, you’ll become more accustomed to how the Spanish past progressive should sound. You can also hear more about it in this podcast from News in Slow Spanish. 

But when are you supposed to use this tense in Spanish?

When to Use the Spanish Past Progressive Tense

To describe something that was happening

Use the Spanish past progressive tense when you want to talk about what was happening in the past.

Take a look at the following examples and pay attention to the similarities between both languages:

If you’re thinking that these sentences sound a little weird, as if something were missing from them, I agree with you.

It’s common to find these kinds of examples when learning the past progressive, but for a Spanish native speaker (and even for speakers of English), something isn’t quite right.

To place an action in time

The weirdness I mentioned above can be easily solved if you add a time expression to the sentences.

Time expressions vary depending on the day, year or even specific times. It would be impossible to add all of them here, so let me give you some examples instead:

You can even mix them together:

If we add some of these time expressions to our examples above, we get:

Don’t you think they sound much better now? I certainly do!

To speak of an action that was interrupted

Lastly, you will find the past progressive in sentences describing actions interrupted by another action.

This also happens in English, but while English uses the past progressive and the past simple, Spanish uses the past progressive and the preterite tense. The interrupting action is highlighted in bold in the examples below:

The Difference Between the Imperfect and the Past Progressive

A lot of people mix up the Spanish imperfect and the past progressive. While it’s true that they’re similar (the past progressive uses the imperfect tense of estar) and often have identical translations in English, there’s a slight difference between them.

Learning how and when to use the appropriate one of the two will definitely help you improve your Spanish conversation and writing skills.

Here’s a quick and easy guide to deciding which tense you should use:

1. Use the imperfect tense for habits and actions that happened over an extended period of time, with or without pause:

Comía en casa de abuela cada domingo. (I used to eat at grandma’s house each Sunday.)

Estudiaba inglés porque quería ser profesor. (I would study/used to study English because I wanted to be a professor.)

2. Use the past progressive for an ongoing action in specific situations that took place at a particular moment in time:

Estaba comiendo en casa de abuela ayer a las dos de la tarde. (Yesterday at 2 p.m., I was eating at grandma’s house.)

Estaba estudiando inglés porque mañana tengo un examen. (I was studying English because I have an exam tomorrow.)

With this post, you should be ready to rock your Spanish to the next level. Remember that the past progressive is easy and very useful, so try to use it as much as you can when talking or writing in Spanish. Don’t forget to add estar to your sentences, or else they will sound really weird!

And as always, happy learning!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

And One More Thing…

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