Preterite (Indefinido)
A flashcard deck for the pretérito indefinido, the tense where Spanish keeps many of its irregular forms.
The hardest group is the strong preterites: verbs whose indefinido is built on a different stem, with their own endings that carry no written accent. Tener → tuve, tuvo; poder → pude, pudo; decir → dije, dijo; hacer → hice, hizo; venir → vine, vino. Ser and ir share fui, fue.
Two forms per card. The front shows the infinitive under the instruction "Give the yo and él forms of the indefinido". Tap the card to turn it: the back shows the yo and the él form, one under the other, with the verb's translation. Together the two forms show the new stem and the unaccented endings, and those are what make a verb a strong preterite.
The forms are coloured as in the conjugation tables (see The conjugation colour code (Spanish)). An irregular stem is red. An ending that is the regular one is underlined. The special endings of a strong preterite (tuve, tuv**o) are blue.
The book opens the verb's conjugation, showing the indefinido only. The speaker reads the infinitive on the front, and both forms on the back.
Grading. On iPhone and iPad, swipe right if you knew both forms and left if you didn't. On the Mac, and with VoiceOver, use the Wrong and Correct buttons. The card then moves on by itself.
How the deck is built. Every verb in your selection whose yo or él form is irregular in the indefinido is in the deck, plus half as many regular verbs for comparison. The line under the progress bar shows the mix. If your selection has none, the screen offers Edit your verb selection or Use every verb (just for this drill).
The session. The Incorrect answers switch, session length, answer count and end of the session work as in Verb meaning. Each graded card is recorded twice on your device: once for the yo form and once for the él form.