Verbos irregulares pretérito

The thing most students of Spanish complain about when it comes to the preterite / simple past, isn’t knowing when to use it, but rather the fact that there are so many irregular verbs!

Some do their own sweet thing:

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you – SER & IR are the same!

Some verbs are only irregular in some conjugations, taking the regular preterite endings otherwise.

Here’s a reminder of the regular endings.

Then we have verbs which end in CAR, GAR or ZAR.
These have a spelling change in the YO form only, in order to preserve pronunciation. All other conjugations take the regular endings.
e.g.
BUSCAR – yo busqué

LLEGAR – yo llegué

EMPEZAR – yo empecé

Many follow a specific conjugation but change at the stem or root. These endings are for all stem changing verbs in this tense.

I’ve separated these particular irregular verbs into groups. Some verbs belong to more than one group. This isn’t a complete list, but I’ve included the most commonly used verbs.