parar means: to draw up, to leave off, to stop
In this lesson we will see how to conjugate the verb parar in the Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto tense of the Indicativo mood. It means we will see step by step how to create the following conjugation:
yo | había parado | I had drawn up |
tú | habías parado | you had drawn up |
él/ella/usted | había parado | he/she/it had drawn up |
nosotros/nosotras | habíamos parado | we had drawn up |
vosotros/vosotras | habíais parado | you had drawn up |
ellos/ellas/ustedes | habían parado | they had drawn up |
How to translate Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto to English
Notice that the phrases in English in the third column of the above conjugation table are not direct translations from Spanish to English. They are usually the closest general equivalents. The example differences are:- In Spanish, there is the form usted in the third person singular. But this person does not translate to the English third person singular. It translates to the so called formal you and uses the inflected form which is most often represented as he/she/it in English conjugation charts.
- Similar situation happens in the third person plural, where ustedes translates to the English plural formal you but uses the form which corresponds to the they form in English.
- Tenses are used differently in Spanish and English, so the actual translation should always take into account the context and focus on translating the meaning, not just words.
- In both languages each verb may have multiple meanings and not every meaning translates directly to the other language. Here also, the context and focusing on the particular meaning helps to create the most accurate translation.
Step by step instructions
Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto is a compound tense (Spanish: compuesto). It means that all of its conjugated forms consist of two words. In Spanish language, there are also simple tenses, where each conjugated verb form is one word long. In a compound tense the endings of the auxiliary verb change, not the endings of the main verb, which is the case in Spanish simple tenses. In the compound tenses, every person’s form consist of two parts:
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See the conjugation charts and this haber conjugation lesson to learn how to conjugate the auxiliary verb haber. That’s a separate topic, so for brevity we will focus on the parts derived from parar only here. In order to create the Participio form, we need a stem and an ending. We use the stem of the infinitive of the main verb, and a single ending, which depends on the conjugation group of the main verb. So we need to start by splitting the infinitive into a stem and an ending. It’s really easy to do – simply remove two letters from the end of the infinitive to get the ending – one of -ar, -er, -ir. What’s left is the stem. So in case of our verb:
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Based on the ending of the infinitive we can tell that parar belongs to the -ar verb group. This group, in turn, uses the -ado ending in its Participio form. Putting all that together, our Participio is: parado. Now, as we understand how both parts used by this tense are created separately, let’s move on with creating the final conjugation forms. |
In order to create the first person singular form, we simply take the first person singular form of haber conjugated in Pretérito Imperfecto de Indicativo, which is había. And to that we add the Participio parado to get había parado:
Next, to create the form for the second person singular, we again simply take the second person singular form of haber from the Pretérito Imperfecto de Indicativo tense, and that is habías. And to this auxiliary verb we add the Participio parado (so the exact same word as previously) to get habías parado:
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Similarly, if we want to create the form for the third person singular, we conjugate haber in the Pretérito Imperfecto tense and we utilize the corresponding person’s form (third person singular), namely había. Then we also take the same Participio as for all other persons, and putting them together we get había parado:
The first person plural has the form habíamos parado. It’s created by following the same logic as in the other persons. We first take the form of the first person plural from haber conjugation in the Pretérito Imperfecto de Indicativo tense: habíamos. Second, and to this word we again add the Participio of parar: parado to get habíamos parado:
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Again, let’s do the same for the second person plural. We need to get the conjugated form of the verb haber in the Pretérito Imperfecto de Indicativo tense, second person plural, and that’s habíais. Next, we take the unchanged Participio, we join them, and we get habíais parado:
And finally, the last grammatical person on the list, the third person plural, has the form habían parado. We create it in the exact same manner as in all the other grammatical persons. We need the third person plural of haber first, from its Pretérito Imperfecto conjugation. It is habían. We add the Participio of parar again (parado) to get habían parado:
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That’s it! The conjugation is now complete. But don’t end your session yet – it is very important to repeat and practice the material in order to remember it. Check below for some links.
Next Steps
- To practice this conjugation and test your knowledge check this Conjugation Exercise or the Memory Game
- For exercises and examples related to parar visit our Exercise section
- To see conjugation charts in all tenses for parar visit the Conjugator
- To explore other learning materials visit the Study section