Spanish language Q&A Forum

I thought I was feeling pretty comfortable with the differences between the preterite and imperfect but this one has stumbled me.

"He had an English girlfriend" you have translated as Él tuvo una novia inglesa. 

But I would see this sentence as: "He used to have an English girlfriend" (Él tenía una novia inglesa) which would require the imperfect, as it is implied that he no longer has this same girlfriend.

Have I missed something or are both acceptable?

In both cases, I was hesitant about whether to include the definite articles and I erred on the side of including them - which was wrong. 

#1 - I put "vamos a intercambiar las ideas" instead of just "ideas". I've found that in English we use the definite articles much less than in Spanish, so I think I need a refresher of when to use them and when to leave them out! Can you point me in the right direction?

#2  - And with "voy a salir de casa temprano" , I actually had put this correct answer first but then doubted myself and put "voy a salir temprano de la casa". Can you explain why this is wrong? Thanks!

I just had this question

Tal vez vosotras ________ cansadas después de bailar.

This was a checkbox question with these options

estuvierais
estuvisteis
estáis
estaréis
estuvieseis

Based on the lesson on this page, I would expect both the indicative and subjunctive to be correct (estuvisteis, estuvierais, estuvieseis).

However, the question had a hint:

(HINT: Conjugate "estar" in El Imperfecto de Subjuntivo)

Based on this I left off the indicative and my responses (just estuvierais and estuvieseis) were scored as correct.

The result is that I'm left uncertain about using estuvisteis here, and about the limits of the applicability of the lesson on the page.

If estuvisteis is OK here, then I think the question should be revised to not have that hint, and to check for the three correct answers. That way students like me wouldn't be confused thinking "Well, in the lesson , it says you can use indicative or subjunctive with no change in meaning. But here, apparently the indicative is wrong, so that lesson can't be trusted. I wonder what the real pattern is. I guess I'll need to look elsewhere to find out."

On the other hand, if the indicative is wrong here, then I think this lesson, or some other lesson, should give some hint about why that is so, since I'm reading this lesson as saying that either the subjunctive or indicative is OK.

Thanks for your help!

Inma, in your answer to Sierra, you said "Your answer is correct using the article." But as Sierra correctly said in her question, "Él" in this case is a prounoun, not the article "el". 

One of the listening exercises uses the parase "martes y trece" which I believe would translate to "Tuesday the 13th". Please consider adding that method of stating a date to the lesson on dates as I checked and there is no current discussion or example of this usage that I could find. Thanks for all you do!