Learn Spanish (Latin America): Por la tarde, nosotros empezábamos a saltar la cuerda. - In the afternoon, we would start to jump rope.

In the imperfect tense, the nosotros form of -ar verbs always gets an accent mark on the first a of the ending (like -ábamos). This keeps the spoken stress on the correct syllable. Other forms like yo empezaba don't need it because the natural stress already falls in the right place.

The translation says "we would start". Isn't "would" a different tense?

In English, we often use "would" to describe past habits, meaning "we used to start". In Spanish, this concept is expressed using the imperfect tense. You don't use the conditional tense here because it is a repeated past action, not a hypothetical "what if" scenario.

Doesn't empezar usually have a stem change, like in empiezo?

That is a great catch! In the present tense, empezar changes its stem to empiez-. However, one of the best things about the imperfect tense is that there are absolutely no stem changes. You just take the original stem (empez-) and add your ending.

Why is there an a between empezábamos and saltar?