When do you use the Preterite and the Imperfect?

In English, we often forget that we have many different ways of expressing something that happened in the past, and it is the same in Spanish. There is the simple perfect tense, which is easily translated as: 'To have done something' and 'haber + past participle in Spanish, which is easy to grasp, but the preterite and the imperfect are more challenging. The imperfect can be remembered like this: it is a habitual action that recurred in the past, something that 'you were doing' over a period of time. It can literally be translated as 'I was doing' or 'I did' but the former is simpler in deciding what tense to use. It can also be translated to 'used to' which implies you habitually used to do something.The preterite is an abrupt tense that has a definitive start and end point. When not sure whether to use to preterite or not, it is helpful to ask yourself if it answers the question: 'what happened?'. On this day, I was doing this when I DID this. The singular, emphasised event would be translated into the preterite tense.