Be sure to check out and read through Dr. Decker’s discussion of the Imperfect wordform. Its a nice exposition.
I like his use of examples & discussion over the traditional “translate the Imperfect in such-n-such a manner” that is typical of many discussions found in beginning classes.
It’s fun to try to bring out in translation the peculiarities of the TAM system (tense-aspect-mood) that a source text instantiates.
But in the end, a compromise is necessary. The source TAM system has to be mapped onto a target TAM system, that of (more or less natural) English, with the inevitable distortion that implies.
TAM…that’s an acronym I haven’t heart for almost two years…