Thread: Giving tequila
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Old October 11, 2008, 08:49 PM
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Ella me estaba dando tequila anoche.
Ella me daba tequila anoche.

The first sentence contains an imperfect progressive tense. Progressive means in progress. English speakers tend to overuse the progressive tenses in Spanish, and even incorrectly use them to describe a future action. The imperfect progressive tense is used when an action was in progress in the past but was interrupted by something else. So, 'ella me estaba dando' translates to 'she was in the process of giving me (when something else happened)'. The more common tense used to describe an incomplete past action is the imperfect tense, which appears in the second sentence. This translates to 'she was giving me'.

A completed past action - she gave me - uses the preterite (ella me dio).
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