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Trey t 47a7871c38 Add 13 new grammar notes with 1010 exercises from video extraction

Scraped a 4h Spanish fundamentals YouTube video (transcript + OCR on
14810 frames), extracted structured content across 52 chapters, and
generated fill-in-the-blank quizzes for every grammar topic.

- 13 new GrammarNote entries (articles, possessives, demonstratives,
  greetings, poder, al/del, prepositional pronouns, irregular yo,
  stem-changing, stressed possessives, present/future perfect, present
  indicative conjugation)
- 1010 generated exercises across all 36 grammar notes (new + existing)
- Fix tense guide parser to handle unnumbered *Usages* blocks
- Rewrite 6 broken tense guide bodies (imperative, subj pluperfect,
  subj future) with numbered usage format
- Bump courseDataVersion 5→6 with TenseGuide refresh on upgrade
- Add docs/spanish-fundamentals/ with raw transcripts, polished notes,
  structured JSON, and exercise data

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-04-16 08:40:05 -05:00

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26. Past Tense of "Ser" and "Ir"

Source: video

Ser (to be) and ir (to go) share the exact same preterite forms: fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuisteis, fueron. Context — especially the preposition a after the verb — tells them apart.

Key Rules

Ser and ir are identical in the preterite.
Tell them apart by context: if the preposition a follows (with or without an infinitive), the verb is ir.
Ser in the preterite is used for events that specifically happened (when, where, how events took place).
For describing what things or people were like, use the imperfect (era) — coming in a later chapter.

Conjugation / Pattern Tables

ser / ir — preterite (same forms)

Pronoun	Form	Meaning
yo	fui	I was / I went
tú	fuiste	you were / you went
él/ella	fue	he was / he went
nosotros	fuimos	we were / we went
vosotros	fuisteis	y'all were / y'all went
ellos	fueron	they were / they went

Examples

Spanish	English
Yo voy a la tienda.	I go to the store. (present, ir)
Yo fui a la tienda.	I went to the store. (preterite, ir)
Tú vas a hacer tu tarea.	You go to do your homework. (present, ir)
Tú fuiste a hacer tu tarea.	You went to do your homework. (preterite, ir)
Ella fue al concierto ayer.	She went to the concert yesterday. (ir)
Fuimos a ver la fiesta.	We went to see the party. (ir)
La película fue aburrida.	The movie was boring. (ser — event/judgment)
Fue difícil hacer la prueba.	It was difficult to do the test. (ser)
La fiesta fue en el club.	The party was in the club. (ser — event location)

Notes & Gotchas

The classic test: look for the preposition a after the conjugation. Fui a la tienda = "I went"; Fui doctor = "I was a doctor."
Fue is one of the most common Spanish words — often translated as "it was."
Fue (preterite) vs era (imperfect): La película fue aburrida = "The movie was boring (as an event)." La película era aburrida = "The movie used to be / was [generally] boring." Use fue for completed events, era for descriptions of how things were.
No accents on fui, fue, fuiste, etc. — these forms are exceptions to the usual accent rules.

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