Past simple tense 'dar' and 'hacer'
I believe that if you start a subject, you might just as well go for the whole thing and worry about remembering it all later on. So we are covering the whole of the past simple tense and have so far looked at regular verb endings and a few which have minor changes in the third person.
So we will now go for the irregular verbs, of which there are quite a few. There’s not a lot that can be said or done to make these any more palatable than they are, which they are not. When I write a sentence like that in English, I wonder about my skills as a language teacher.
So, with that magnificent introduction we will start with a common, often used, irregular past tense verb, namely DAR meaning “to give”. This is how it goes:
di I gave diste you gave dio he or she gave
dimos we gave disteis you (plural) gave
dieron they gave
“He gave me the book”, therefore is “me dio el libro”. “We gave them the directions.” “les dimos las direcciones”. “I gave it to you yesterday” “te lo di ayer”. “Did you (plu) give the children the sweets?” “¿Disteis los caramelos a los niños?” Notice that in a question we don’t translate “Did”. It is as though we are saying “You gave the sweets to the children?”
Another issue has emerged here which is the “object pronouns” (me, les, te, lo etc.) We will come back to them a little later.
Now for another irregular verb in this tense: HACER which means “to make” or “to do”. This is very useful for asking questions about people actions in the past. Here it is first in all its glory:
hice I did/made hiciste you did/ made hizo he or she did/made hicimos we did / made hicisteis you (plural) did/ made hicieron they did/made
A typical question therefore is “¿Qué hiciste ayer?” “What did you do yesterday?” You can already answer this question quite competently with the verbs already studied in the past tense. Have a go at it now! You probably won’t need the verb “hacer” in the answer but you might want to say “I went” which is “fui”. Yes, this is a highly irregular form of that lovely verb “ir”. We have that to look forward to next week. See you then.