![]() Satisfaire → satisfait (to satisfy, satisfied) ![]() Some of these do look funky, but the good thing is that many groups follow similar patterns: There are, of course, some commonly used verbs whose past participles do not follow the rules and look a little unexpected. Ils finissent leurs devoirs à l’heure. → Ils ont fini leurs devoirs à l’heure. → Nous avons cuisiné le dîner après le match de basket. Nous cuisinons le dîner après le match de basket. Je mange mon déjeuner à midi. → J’ ai mangé mon déjeuner à midi. Let’s practice turning some present tense sentences into the past tense with the passé composé: That simple.įor regular -RE verbs, replace the -RE ending with a -U. Now try to translate the following examples in English following the pattern of the example above.įor regular -IR verbs, take off the -IR and replace it with an -I. Je march e (I walk) → j’ ai march é (I walked) *Don’t forget the accent aigu on the é, it’s a crucial component of the participle! Let’s look at each verb group separately: -ER, -IR, and -RE.įor all -ER verbs, all we have to do is take off the -ER and replace it with an -É The past participle is the “studied” in the example sentence, “I have studied.” Participles are formed by changing the endings of the verb, and, depending on the verb group, this change will vary. In the meantime, brush up on your conjugation of avoir and être… you’ll need to have these down pat to form the passé composé with ease. We will explain when to use être as an auxiliary shortly. The most commonly used is avoir, but être is also used in special circumstances. ![]() There are two auxiliary verbs in French: avoir and être. Subject + auxiliary verb (avoir/être) + past participle The passé composé has a very straightforward recipe: Now let’s learn how to form the passé composé. We will point out all the nuances to keep an eye out for as they come along. If you are still feeling unsure, don’t worry. But in the sentence, “When I saw the spider, I shrieked!” both of the actions, seeing and shrieking, are succinct and we can clearly define their start and end. You could have been afraid for months or years, so French uses the imparfait. If you were to say, “When I was a kid, I was afraid of spiders,” both “was a kid” and “was afraid” are actions that are hard to put a start and end-point to. Let’s look at one more example just for good measure. Right now, we are going to focus on completed actions in the past, in this case when Sophie ‘ walked in.’ Her action was swift and not ongoing, and French uses the passé composé for such actions. This continuous action in the past is often expressed in English with “was/were _-ing” and French uses the imparfait, which we will learn later on. The ‘cooking’ is something that was taking place over a longer period of time and that Marie was still in the process of doing. In the sentence, “Marie was cooking dinner when Sophie walked in,” there are two actions: cooking and walking. French has several past tenses, but there are two that are the most frequently used in regular conversation:įor now, we will start with learning the Passé Composé, but it is important to know how both tenses are used and how they differ from each other. Now that we have solid footing in both the present and the future tenses, it is time to learn how to talk about the past. Try to listen for words about numerical order and location, and remember that it’s perfectly OK if you don’t understand everything. Use the detailed lesson below to find ways in which adverbs can affect the past tense and listen for examples in the video!īelow you will find a video about a couple meeting up at the movies, and in it you will hear many of the concepts that are covered in detail in the lesson following the clip. You will find a video below about a satirical reality TV show, which will test how well you can comprehend speaking about the past. Drill yourself with the Brainscape flashcards and take note of which verbs are regular and irregular, since this greatly affects the formation of the past tense we will learn in this lesson. Knowing when to use the past tense is as crucial as knowing how to form it. Be sure to review the conjugations we saw in Lesson 2, as well as the immediate future tense we saw in the previous lesson. In this lesson, we are going to tackle one of the more complicated parts of the French language–talking about the past.
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