There are 4 main past tenses in Spanish. The imperfect tense is one of the two simple past tenses in Spanish. Use the imperfect to talk about a habit, or an action that was spread over an extended period of time, this could be a continuous action or situation, or one with possible stops and starts. Even though English doesn’t have a direct equivalent tense for Imperfect, it is more or less equivalent to (used to) and (past continuous)