Learn Spanish (Spain): Compramos mucho jamón en España el año pasado. - We bought a lot of ham in Spain last year.

Yes, it does! For regular -ar verbs like comprar, the 'we' form is exactly the same in both the present tense and the simple past tense. You have to rely on context clues like el año pasado to know it means 'we bought' in this sentence.

Why is it mucho jamón instead of muy jamón?

Mucho means 'a lot of' or 'much' and is used with nouns like jamón. You only use muy (meaning 'very') before adjectives or adverbs. For example, if you wanted to say the ham was very good, you would use muy and say muy bueno.

Does mucho change depending on the word that comes after it?

Yes, when mucho describes a noun, it acts like an adjective and changes to match the gender and number of that noun. Because jamón is masculine and singular, we use mucho. If you bought a lot of apples (manzanas, which is feminine plural), you would say muchas manzanas.

Why does the word pasado come after año?

In Spanish, describing words (adjectives) usually come after the noun they describe. Pasado literally means 'past', so el año pasado translates directly as 'the year past'. It also changes to match the noun, which is why 'last week' would be la semana pasada.