Preterite of regular verbs: Grammar guide

Why do I have learn the preterite tense?

It's really important to know how to talk about things that happened. We're only going to get so far in our communication if we talk about the present. We can't say things like, "Yesterday, I go to the store. Last week, I buy two shirts." So, with the preterite, we can talk about things we did before.

Some key things to remember:

• The preterite is one of two past tenses in Spanish (the other is imperfect, which we'll learn later)
  
  
• We conjugate these in the usual way (just like we learned with present tense verbs): take off the -ar, -er, or -ir ending, and add the appropriate preterite ending.