This Spanish Medium Review quiz will introduce you to conjugating AR verbs in the past tense. The past tense in Spanish is stated as the pretérito tense. If you have not already done so, please check out the Spanish Medium Review titled Grammar: Learning to Conjugate in the Past Tense as that quiz will provide you with a little more detailed information regarding conjugating verbs in the past tense.
In the quiz Grammar: Learning to Conjugate in the Past Tense you learned the past tense endings for AR, ER and IR verbs. You also only worked on regular verbs. As you know, however, Spanish has both regular verbs and irregular verbs. What you may not know is that some verbs can be regular in the present tense and then irregular in the past tense. Now isn’t that going to be mighty confusing?
Because verbs can change from regular to irregular verbs depending upon the tense they are being conjugated in, many of the introductions in the Spanish Medium Review quizzes will provide you with the verb’s complete conjugated forms. This will only be provided once, however, so you will really need to pay close attention to them and practice, not only using the verb, but seeing it and spelling it. The more you learn how to use your verbs, the easier their correct spellings with the correct verb tenses will become. Now let’s look at the following AR verbs, both in their present tense form and in their past tense form.
Did you notice that lanzar is irregular in the past tense but only with the pronoun of 'I'. Instead of lanzé the 'z' is changed to a 'c'. This connects back to the rule about when a noun ends with the letter 'z' it is changed to a 'c' when adding 'es'. You are not adding 'es' but rather an 'é' so the same rule applies with verbs when an 'e' ending is added to the base when it ends with the letter 'z'.
Now that you are learning the past tense you can once again see the importance of the accent mark. To say 'hablo' means 'I speak' but to say 'habló' with the accent mark above the 'o' it then means 'he/she/you/it spoke'. That little, teeny mark makes a huge difference!
You have now reached the quiz section. This quiz will only focus on the AR verbs listed in the introduction. Read each quiz question and then see if you can quickly locate the correct answer. Be sure to study the conjugated forms of these AR verbs carefully, including when they are regular or irregular. When you feel comfortable, begin the quiz!