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The difference between the preterite and the imperfect (and in certain cases, the perfect) is often hard to grasp for English speakers. English has just one past-tense form, which can have aspect added to it by auxiliary verbs, but not in ways that reliably correspond to what occurs in Spanish.
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The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
A Spanish verb has nine indicative tenses with more-or-less direct English equivalents: the present tense ('I walk'), the preterite ('I walked'), the imperfect ('I was walking' or 'I used to walk'), the present perfect ('I have walked'), the past perfect —also called the pluperfect— ('I had walked'), the future ('I will walk'), the future ...
The imperfect (abbreviated IMPERF) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk". It contrasts with preterite forms, which refer to a single completed event in the past.
The form dé is so written to distinguish it from the preposition de. Both verbs are also irregular in the preterite and derived tenses: dar follows the pattern of regular -er/-ir verbs, while estar has an anomalous preterite stem and follows the corresponding common pattern:
The imperfective aspect may be fused with the past tense, for a form traditionally called the imperfect. In some cases, such as Spanish and Portuguese , this is because the imperfective aspect occurs only in the past tense; others, such as Georgian and Bulgarian , have both general imperfectives and imperfects.
It semantically corresponds to the distinction between the morphological forms known respectively as the aorist and imperfect in Greek, the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past (passé simple) and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin (from the Latin perfectus, meaning "completed").