Word
Él terminó el colegio, pero luego recibía notas terribles en la universidad.
Meaning
He finished high school, but later he used to receive terrible grades at the university.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Él terminó el colegio, pero luego recibía notas terribles en la universidad.
él
he
pero
but
en
in / on / at
recibir
to receive
Questions & Answers about Él terminó el colegio, pero luego recibía notas terribles en la universidad.
Why does this sentence use terminó for finishing high school but recibía for getting bad grades?
This sentence is a great example of how Spanish uses two different past tenses together. terminó is in the preterite tense because finishing high school is viewed as a single, completed event. recibía is the imperfect tense of the -ir verb recibir. It is used here because getting terrible grades was an ongoing or repeated situation (he used to receive them) over a period of time at the university.
Wait, doesn't colegio mean college?
That is a very common mix-up! colegio is a false friend — a word that looks like English but means something else. In Spanish, colegio usually refers to a high school or elementary school. If you want to talk about college or university, you use universidad, just like at the end of this sentence.
How do we form the imperfect tense for an -ir verb like recibir?
For regular -er and -ir verbs, you drop the ending and add -ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos, or -ían. Since we are talking about él (he), we use the -ía ending to get recibía. Notice that every single one of these endings has a written accent on the i!