The preterite tense: How to talk about the past in Spanish. Sometimes we want to talk about things that have already happened and for that you need the preterite, which is a past tense.

You use the perfect tense when, in English, you would say that something has happened. So, if you wanted to say: ‘You have been to the hairdresser,' 'she has eaten all the biscuits’ or anything else ...