The Village of Yesterday: Spanish Past Tenses

The Village of Yesterday teaches the hardest thing in Spanish — preterite versus imperfect — by making you see it instead of memorising it. You are a lantern-bearer in a top-down village. Each ghost memory brings a sentence: 'De niño ___ en la plaza todos los días.' Your lantern carries the verb stem; the endings drift around you: -aba, -ó, -aron, -ábamos. Whichever one you walk over decides what the memory does. Take an imperfect ending and the ghost loops forever (it was going on). Take a preterite ending and it flashes once and freezes (it happened, it ended). Six chapters open in order: regular preterite in the square, imperfect by the river, the 'which tense?' decision at the school, irregular stems at the market (tener → tuv-, hacer → hic-, ir/ser → fu-), the old house where the imperfect turns out to have only three irregular verbs, and a final night with everything mixed. For irregular verbs the lantern starts empty: you hunt the stem first, then the ending. The fog of forgetting drifts after you and erases words; your lantern pushes it back. Clue words in each sentence (ayer, siempre, de repente) light up in the colour of their tense and one line explains why. Every verb you collect is written into the Cuaderno with both conjugation tables, irregular stems underlined. Keyboard and touch joystick, dark and light themes, fully offline.