It’s a linguistic use it or lose it rule.
The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that frequent use - in many languages, not just English - gives words their staying power. Irregular verbs are the bane of any effort to learn English, but new research looking at how language evolves suggests frequent use keeps pesky irregular verbs like "take" from evolving into "taked." REUTERS/Catherine Benson In this way, we can also say that the action expressed using pretérito indefinido interrupts another action, which is expressed using imperfecto.A generic picture of an English dictionary and a thesaurus. Then, we express the context by using the pretérito imperfecto while the main action is expressed using the pretérito indefinido. For example:Īyer, cuando volvía a casa me encontré a mi amiga Ana.Įl domingo por la tarde, cuando salía de casa sonó el teléfono. The pretérito imperfecto gives the details of what was happening when something else happened.