
Samuel G. answered 04/03/23
PhD in Spanish with 10 Years Teaching Experience
ANSWER
Cuando yo tenía (tener) cinco años, mi madre me contaba (contar) muchas leyendas. Mis favoritas eran (ser) las leyendas aztecas porque yo quería (querer) ser un guerrero valiente. Todos los sábados mi madre, mis hermanas y yo íbamos (ir) a la biblioteca para sacar libros. Ellos preferían (preferir) los libros cortos y fáciles pero yo siempre sacaba (sacar) las leyendas. A las seis, nosotros siempre regresaríamos (regresar) a casa. Mi madre siempre estaba (estar) contenta cuando nos veía (ver) con muchos libros.
EXPLANATION
We know we're going to have to use the past tense here, but which one? In Spanish we have several options. We are given a context clue from the very first sentence, "When I was five years old...". This was a prolonged period of time in the past, not a specific moment. We have other context clues, "siempre" "todos los sábados". These triggers suggest we are talking about about actions that repeated habitually in the past ("always" "every Saturday") instead of single, one-off events. From these clues we know we must use the IMPERFECT TENSE. This is the tense that can be translated roughly as "used to do something", and ends in -aba for -AR verbs in the yo from, and -ía for -ER/-IR verbs. Then it's just a case of deciding the most appropriate verb from the list for each space.
Posdata:- Don't forget your accents.