The ‘passé composé ‘- A Guide
This is one of the most common past tenses in French, in fact the one that people use most of the time, is called the passé composé, or sometimes the perfect tense.
It's formed in two parts:
1. The auxiliary verb avoir or être.
2. The past participle of the major verb.
When do I use it?
There are two main past tenses in French, but we will only focus on the passé composé in this post, but I am more than happy to make a post about the other called passé simple or Imperfect tense.
The good news is that passé composé is the most common tense and that you can express yourself well if it’s the only past tense you know how to use.
You use it to highlight past actions and to talk about:
Completed actions.
Repeated actions.
Series of actions.
Conditions in likely situations.
We use the passé composé to talk about one-time, completed actions. This tense places the emphasis on the result or consequences of the action.
For example, you would use the passé composé for having taken a test yesterday, but you'd use the imperfect for having been a student (for an unspecified amount of time).
When using spoken language, the passé composé is typically used instead of the passé simple.
The Past Participle - What is it and how to form it
The past participle is a form of the verb you want to use in the past in the passé composé.
Like with all French verb conjugation there're three types of verbs to look out for; -ER, -IR and -RE but there's always verbs that are irregular, I’ll explain those too.
For -ER verbs, just remove the -ER and add é. For example, manger, or to eat, has a past participle of mangé.
-IR verbs are very similar, get rid of the -IR and add an i as the ending. For example, sortir, or to take out or go out, becomes sorti.
To form the past participle of -RE verbs, take off the -RE ending, and instead add u as the new ending. Take attendre, for example, which means to expect, attendre has a past participle attendu.
Finally, there are the irregulars. These require some memorization, but are common enough that once you get used to using them it shouldn't be an issue. Here are a few of the more common irregular past participles that you should take a note of:
avoir - To have - eu
être - To be - été
boire - To drink - bu
lire - To read - lu
prendre - To take - pris
dire - To say - dit
faire - To do - fait
There are definitely more of these but these are the most commonly used.
If you're unsure if a verb is irregular or of the conjugation of that verb, look it up! There are lots of websites that show you the full conjugation for every tense.
Forming the Passé Composé
To form the Passé Composé, you're going to need to know the present tense conjugation of the verbs avoir, and être memorized. This will be our ‘auxiliary verb’ In case you're a little rusty, here it is for you:
Avoir - To Have
J'ai
Tu as
Il/Elle/On a
Nous avons
Vous avez
Ils/Elles ont
Etre - To Be
Je suis
Tu es
Il/Elle est
Nous sommes
Vous êtes
Ils/Elles sont
To conjugate the passé composé we use the present tense of avoir or être as an auxiliary verb followed by the past participle.
So for example,
Auxiliary + Past Participle
j'ai + mangé
elle a + mangé
The verb avoir is the standard when using the passé composé. However, DR MRS VANDERTRAMP verbs use the auxiliary verb être in the past tense instead and I have a whole post explaining what they are!
J'ai fait un gâteau pour toi. - I made a cake for you. Ils ont apprécié le gâteau. - They enjoyed the cake. Il est allé chercher plus de gâteau. - He went and got more cake. - This is a DR MRS VANDERTRAMP verb
I hope this helps! If you have any questions please don't be afraid to send me a message I’ll try my best to help :)