Tense names

Sherri ..C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor

Tense names

Asked 6 years ago
GruffNative Spanish expert teacher in Kwiziq
Hi Sherry - do you have a question? 
Sherri ..C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor

Not a question, but I  think your program should identify in English, one clear definition of the many Spanish names of verb tenses, i.e., Pertérito Indefinido, etc. = Past Tense.

It is very confusing as it is.  Too many different names.

GruffNative Spanish expert teacher in Kwiziq

Ah, yes. We've been discussing how to handle this for a while actually. There are up to four different Spanish tense names in use in different countries, unfortunately, for every tense which makes things very confusing as there's no global standard. We'll adopt one standard ourselves but also put up a full table so people can look up other names. We're also exploring the idea of letting you choose a preferred name for a given tense which the system will then use everywhere - but this is quite a difficult thing to implement, so we won't be able to do that any time time soon. I'll post a link to the tense names table though when it's up.

Thanks for reminding me about this!

GruffNative Spanish expert teacher in Kwiziq

Hey Sherri - here's the table of Spanish Tense names and English equivalents for you, as promised:

https://progress.lawlessspanish.com/spanish-tense-names

Hopefully that will help a little. It's worth writing down some of the variations, especially pretérito/indefinido and putting them on the wall where you can see them. You can print this page too but writing them out will help you remember them.

Sherri ..C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor
Yes, this will be helpful.  Thank you, Gruff
Andy E.C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor
I'm pleased to see this is on the site. I learnt Spanish using English tense names only and so this caught me out on the placement test. The question said "El Pretérito Perfecto" and all I saw was "Preterite" :-)
Maybe you could add a hypelink at the top of a placement test (or any other test for that matter) that would direct people there for clarification.
Brett T.C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor
Thank you for this list. When I took the initial "test your level" quiz I scored quite poorly because of my lack of familiarity with the alternative terms. I gave many acceptable Spanish responses but often not in the forms requested and subsequently got the answers incorrect. I think it would be worth alerting newcommers to this site to this list and recommend familiarising oneself with it before taking the initial quiz.
Gruff D.A1Kwiziq community member
Thanks Andy and Brett - nice ideas I'll think about how to do that. It would need to be a popup I think in order to ensure they don't get lost and we could pick the most troublesome tenses to keep the popup small. We're also looking to change the wording in the hints to make this clearer and hopefully eventually even let users choose which tense names they are most familiar with across the site. The latter won't be quick to do though.

Tense names

Sign in to submit your answer

Don't have an account yet? Join today

Ask a question

Find your Spanish level for FREE

Test your Spanish to the CEFR standard

Find your Spanish level
Getting that for you now...