Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to conjugate regular verbs in the imperfetto and understand its core use for ongoing or habitual past actions.

Lesson Explanation

Where the passato prossimo (previous three lessons) marks a completed action, the imperfetto describes ongoing, habitual, or background actions in the past — genuinely closer to English “used to” or “was …ing.”

All three verb groups share one set of endings, attached to the infinitive stem: -are (parlare): parlavo, parlavi, parlava, parlavamo, parlavate, parlavano. -ere (credere): credevo, credevi, credeva, credevamo, credevate, credevano. -ire (dormire): dormivo, dormivi, dormiva, dormivamo, dormivate, dormivano.

A genuinely rare and useful fact: the imperfetto has very few irregular verbs. The most important is essere: ero, eri, era, eravamo, eravate, erano. Also mildly irregular: fare (building on its Latin root facere): facevo, facevi, faceva, facevamo, facevate, facevano.

Examples: Quando ero bambino, giocavo nel parco ogni giorno. (When I was a child, I used to play in the park every day.) Note both verbs are imperfetto, describing an ongoing state and a habitual action — directly relevant to the tense-choice rules covered in Part 5, Lesson 1.

Practice Questions