We’ve chosen some vocabulary and grammatical concepts from this song and provided flashcards, games and exercises for you to learn and practice them.
Did you miss the analysis for this song? Find it here!
Activities
Vocabulary Excercises
We have chosen 20 words and phrases out of this song to form our vocabulary list, which can be found below. You can use the following activities to learn and practice this vocabulary.
Vocabulary Flashcards – Learn the vocabulary from this song with our sets of Spanish to English and English to Spanish flashcards, then test yourself with our interactive flashcards.
Vocabulary Games – Practice the vocabulary for this song using our memory and matching games and our word search puzzle.
Vocabulary Exercises – Fill in the missing vocabulary with drag and drop and fill in the blanks exercises.
Grammar Exercises
This song provided quite a few preterite tense verbs, and several of these verbs also appear in several different conjugations. Full conjugations of these verbs can be found below.
You can use the following activities to learn and practice these verbs:
Preterite Flashcards – Practice the preterite tense verbs in this song with our sets of Spanish to English and English to Spanish flashcards, then test yourself with our interactive flashcards.
Preterite Games – Practice the preterite tense verbs in this song using our memory and matching games.
Preterite Exercises – Practice the preterite tense verbs in this song using our drag and drop, fill in, and highlighting exercises.
to kill, murder; destroy, extinguish; tide over, satisfy, quench
verb
mataste
mentira
lie, falsehood
fem noun
mentira
tomar
to take; to drink
verb
tomo
tristeza
sadness, sorrow, grief
fem noun
tristeza
Preterite Tense
The Spanish preterite tense (el pretérito) is one of the past tenses in Spanish. It is used for actions that have been completed at some point in the past.
Regular verbs add the endings from the chart below to the normal stem, found by simply removing the -ar, -er, or -ir from the infinitive.
Some verbs undergo spelling changes in the preterite tense. We see two of these in this song. Both apply to the first person singular (yo) form and are made in order to retain the correct sound before the ‘é’ ending. These changes have been highlighted in blue in the charts below. The changes we see are:
For verbs ending in -gar, the ‘g’ changes to ‘gu’.
For verbs ending in -car, the ‘c’ changes to ‘qu’.
-IR verbs that have stem changes in the present tense will undergo a similar stem change in the preterite. The example we see in this song is the verb ‘morir’. In the preterite the change only applies to the third person singular and plural conjugations. The change in the preterite is ‘o’ to ‘u’, rather than ‘o’ to ‘ue’ like in the present tense. These changes are also highlighted in blue in the charts below.
Several verbs, such as ‘ser’, ‘dar’ and ‘decir’ (seen in this song) have irregular conjugations.
Subject
-AR Verbs
-ER and -IR Verbs
1st person singular – yo
-é
-í
2nd person singular – tú
-aste
-iste
3rd person singular – él, ella, Ud
-ó
-ió
1st person plural – nosotros
-amos
-imos
2nd person plural – vosotros
-asteis
-isteis
3rd person plural – ellos, ellas, Uds
-aron
-ieron
Conjugations
Following are the full conjugations of the verbs that appear in the preterite tense in this song.
Practice some of the vocabulary from this song and its preterite tense verbs using these flashcards, games and exercises. Did you miss the analysis for this song? Find it here! Activities Vocabulary Excercises We have Read more…
These exercises are all about practicing the preterite verbs found in this song. The full conjugations can be found on our Activities page. In the lyrics exercises, the preterite verbs have been removed from the Read more…
Test your knowledge of the preterite tense verbs in this song with our memory or matching games. A refresher of the conjugations can be found on our Activities page.
