I know it’s hard. I know that you think the Spanish past tense makes no sense at all. But maybe it’s just that you are looking at it the wrong way.
Past tense in Spanish is, undoubtedly, a hard grammar topic to master. We have four different ones. They don’t correlate to other languages like English, for example, but are not even close to languages such as Italian or French.
In addition, in Spanish itself there is a mix of labels for these names, different for each school of grammar, and different in various Spanish speaking countries. As you can see, past tenses are a challenging topic for native speakers as well.
We have four different past tenses with different names:
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Pretérito Indefinido / Pretérito Perfecto Simple / Pretérito: Yo canté, tú cantaste…
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Pretérito Imperfecto / Copretérito: Yo cantaba, tú cantabas…
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Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto / Presente Perfecto: Yo he cantado, tú has cantado…
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Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto: Yo había cantado, tú habías cantado…
Before continuing this review, I want to say this: everything will be way easier to understand if you know the forms already. You can read more about their use and context, but it’s going to be kind of confusing and vague if you cannot quickly relate the grammar tense with its forms. Don’t worry. That is the easy part! Just a bit of memorizing and you are done.
If you ask what is the most important message from this post, I would answer this: that the difference in the usage of these verbs falls neither in the moment of the past you are speaking about (i.e. before, after…), nor in the length of the action, not even in whether now it is a finished action or it is not.
It falls on the aspect, a grammatical category that refers to whether we see the action in the moment we are speaking from as a finished action, or we don’t see any end (it may have it later or not). This may sound obscure and not useful for you… It is not! But don’t freak out, you will see it more clearly in the tenses comparisons.