Week 2, Day 3 : Passé Composé (Compound Past Tense) and Time Copy Copy
Today, we are going to look at more French grammar rules. Our focus will be on the perfect tense, or “passé composé” — compound past.
• The French perfect tense is equivalent to all three forms of the English past tense: “I have spoken,” “I did speak,” and “I spoke.”
• When talking about something that happened in the past, the verb will consist of two parts: an auxiliary in the present tense, e.g. “avoir,” and the past participle of the verb.
• There are two auxiliaries that are normally used:”avoir,” which means “to have,” and “être,” which means “to be.” An auxiliary is a verb that is used to set the mood or voice of other verbs. It is most commonly used to denote the tense of other verbs, i.e. past, present or future. A past participle refers to the form of the In this case, it is in relation to something that has happened in the past, therefore the verb will need to end in a way that suggests that something has happened in the past.
• As you know, “avoir” means “to have”; we are now going to learn how to form a past participle in relation to this auxiliary. The rules are very simple:
If the verb ends with “er,” you will replace the “er” with “é”; some irregular verbs also follow this rule, such as “aller.”
Listen to Week 2 Day 3 Track 1
Example: manger à mangé, aller à allé, remplacer à remplacé
If the verb ends with “ir,” you will replace “ir” with “i”; you will also do this for some irregular verbs.
Example: finir à fini, sortir à sorti
Although there are some rules for conjugating irregular verbs, in most cases you will simply have to memorize their conjugations; we will look at this in another lesson.
Let’s listen to the dialogue:
Time Expression
It is important to be able to tell the time in French, especially if you are in France on holiday or working and need to catch trains or attend appointments. So, let’s learn about telling the time.
Speaking Practice 1
Let’s listen to the following dialogue to learn how to pronounce the words we’ve learned:
Speaking Practice 2
A Quick Recap of this Lesson
Perfect Tense
The French perfect tense, or past compose, is formed using two parts: the first is an auxiliary verb such as having which is used in the present tense, and the second part is the past participle of the main verb.
Present Tense
The present tense of avoir used in forming the passé composé are the following:
(j’) ai, (tu) as, (il/elle) a, (nous) avons, (vous) avez, and (ils/elles) ont.
Past Participle
1. If the verb ends with –er, drop the –er and replace with –é.
2. If the verb ends with "ir", replace -ir with -i.
3. If the verb is irregular, you need to memorize the past participle form - it's a lesson for another day.
Sharpen Your Knowledge with Exercises
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Listen to the dialogue and and answer the following questions.
Responses