Spanish preterite and French future

The simple-past tense is called el pretérito in Spanish (stress the second syllable). We say preterite or simple past in English, and to round out the nerdiness, it's das Präteritum in German and le prétérit or more commonly le passé simple in French. Just to show you how the preterite works in English, it's like this:

PRESENT: I eat.
PRESENT PERFECT: I have eaten. (with the helping verb have)
PRETERITE: I ate. (no helping verb)

I've been learning, with ChatGPT, the preterite form of some of the most basic irregular verbs in Spanish: ser (to be, permanent states), estar (to be, temporary states and locations), tener (to have), decir (to say), hacer (to do/make), poder (to be able to), ir (to go), and querer (to want/love). While knowing French has helped me a lot in many instances, it's been causing a lot of interference in the Spanish preterite because, alas, the Spanish preterite looks a lot like the French future tense. Even taken on its own terms, the Spanish preterite's endings look utterly different from Spanish present-tense endings. Look at tener:

tener (conjugation in the present tense)

yo tengo
tu tienes
usted tiene
él tiene
nosotros tenemos
vosotros tenéis
ustedes tienen
ellos tienen

Here's tener in the preterite:

yo tuve
tu tuviste
usted tuvo
él tuvo
nosotros tuvimos
vosotros tuvisteis
ustedes tuvieron
ellos tuvieron

Having gotten used to -o being the ending for the yo form of many present-tense verbs, I found it disconcerting to see that -o is the preterite ending for the él form of so many verbs.

And to make matters worse for us French-speakers, look at the ustedes and ellos forms of the preterite of tener: tuvieron. A French-speaker looks at that, and his mind goes, "That's the damn future tense!"

Look at the future form of the French parler (a regular verb, but you'll get the point):

je parlerai
tu parleras
il parlera
nous parlerons
vous parlerez
ils parleront

So the Spanish tuvieron reminds me strongly of the French parlerons and parleront.

Well, fuck me.

Anyway, I've got a ton of Anki flash cards, not to mention a growing pile of real-life paper flashcards. This is all giving me flashbacks to my 2002 intensive-Korean class, when I was learning 60 vocab words a day and barely able to keep up with my much younger Japanese classmates, who all absorbed Korean pretty easily, the way I'd absorbed French decades ago.

Ignore this post. It's all just whining. But know that I spend my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays learning this stuff. Along with everything else I do.

I'll get through this, but as Yoda says in a moment of strangely coherent grammar, You must unlearn what you have learned. The Zen mind is the beginner's mind. Old dogs can't learn new tricks until they make the effort to unlearn—to unlearn old ways, bad habits, and everything else that created furrows, tracks, and ditches in the ground of the intellect. As much as possible, smooth it all out again if you want to plant new seeds.