8.2 Irregular Verbs in the Preterit Tense: Part 2

More irregular verbs in Spanish include those that take a j in the stem. It is a regular feature of Spanish that the combination jie never occurs. Therefore only –eron, not ieron follows for the third-person plural forms:

*All verbs ending in –ucir have the same preterit ending. These include such common verbs as producir (“to produce”), conducir (“to drive), reducir (“to reduce”) and almost all other verbs ending in “-duce” in English.

The verb dar is irregular only because it is an –ar verb that takes the endings for a regular –er or –ir verb.

Pay special attention so as not to confuse the preterit tense forms of poner and poder.
These forms should be distinguishable, as poder retains the d of the infinitive. In the preterit of poner, e.g, puse, one can see that the cognate “to position” or “to posit” becomes more evident.

Additional verbs that change the stem to a u are:

Hubo is the preterit tense of the impersonal hay (“there is/there are”). Note that it is only conjugated in the 3rd person singular form because it is impersonal. Hubo often denotes an action or event in the past and may have a different translation:

Hubo un golpe de estado en Chile en 1973.