Working With El Imperfecto P 42 Answer Key
The imperfect tense in Spanish is one of those grammar points that looks straightforward on paper and then falls apart the moment you try to use it in context. Page 42 of most standard curriculum materials on El Imperfecto tends to cover the regular conjugations and the three irregulars (ir, ser, ver), which is where students hit their first wall. I keep running into the same problem: people memorize the endings but can't actually tell when to pick imperfect over preterite. Here is what the answer key typically contains and how to actually use it instead of just checking your work and moving on. The regular -ar conjugations for imperfect are: hablaba, hablabas, hablaba, hablábamos, hablabais, hablaban. For -er and -ir verbs, it's: comía, comías, comía, comíamos, comíais, comían and vivía, vivías, vivía, vivíamos, vivíais, vivían. The three irregulars are the hard ones — iba, ibas, iba, íbamos, ibais, iban for ir; era, eras, era, éramos, erais, eran for ser; and veía, veías, veía, veíamos, veíais, veían for ver. Notice that ser takes an accent on éramos. I have lost count of the times a student marked that wrong on a test and didn't even notice. The real problem with these worksheets isn't the conjugation itself. It's knowing which context triggers imperfect versus preterite. Page 42 exercises usually include sentences like "Cuando era niño, jugaba en el parque" versus "Ayer estudié para el examen." The answer key will show you the right form, but if you just scroll past it, you are wasting the exercise. I started making my own marginal notes next to each answer explaining why imperfect was chosen — habitual action, ongoing description, age, time, weather, emotional state. That habit cut my grading time in half and my students stopped mixing up the two past tenses as much.
One edge case that trips people up repeatedly: the sentence "De pequeño, yo comía paella todos los domingos" versus "Ayer comí paella." The answer key will list comía for the first and comí for the second. But students keep writing comía for both because they see the past tense marker and assume imperfect is automatic. I had a student once argue with me for twenty minutes that both should be imperfect because paella sounds like something you'd do repeatedly. It wasn't about the paella. It was about the lack of a habit marker in the second sentence. We went through ten more examples together and the pattern finally stuck. Another thing most answer keys don't make clear: the imperfect is used for background description in narratives. If the exercise includes a paragraph describing a setting — "Hacía sol y los pájaros cantaban" — every verb in that descriptive passage should be imperfect, even though the story itself might shift to preterite for specific events. This distinction is rarely spelled out in the answer key and it's the exact reason students lose points on reading comprehension sections of the DELE exam. If you are teaching or studying this material and want a printable reference, most textbook publishers distribute answer keys through their instructor portals rather than publicly. Search for your specific textbook series plus "imperfecto página 42" and you will usually find a PDF on the publisher's site or on educational sharing platforms like Scribd or Course Hero. Be aware that some versions of page 42 across different editions cover slightly different content. Edition 3 of one popular program puts irregulars on page 42 while edition 5 spreads them across pages 41 through 43. Check your ISBN before you start cross-referencing someone else's answer key.
The main limitation of relying on answer keys for this material is that they do not teach you the logic behind the tense choice. They give you the correct form and that is it. If you want actual fluency with imperfect, you need to work through additional practice sets that mix imperfect and preterite in the same paragraph. I recommend the exercises from Realidades Level 2 chapter 7 and the practice sections in the textbook "Ahora sí" by Prentice Hall. Those resources force you to make the distinction actively instead of just filling in blanks with one conjugation pattern. A quick practical note: if you are grading this worksheet yourself, I suggest having students write their reasoning next to each answer before you give them the key. Even two words like "habitual" or "description" will reveal whether they actually understand what they are doing or if they are guessing. I have seen entire classes get 90 percent on the conjugation portion and 40 percent when the same sentences were presented without a word bank. The difference was always context awareness, not memorization.
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