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Le passé composé
le passé composé
Vocabulary note
faire un plan means to make a map or a drawing, as in un plan de la ville for a map of the town.
avoir des projets, ou faire des projets pour l'avenir means to have plans or make plans for the future.
Le passé composé
When you want to talk about an action in the past, you must use a verb in the past
tense. There are a number of different past tenses in French, as there are in
English. Today we are going to look at le passé composé.
Le passé composé is used to express a specific action that takes place in the
past.
It must be an action that happens at a specific time and place. You
should be able to imagine its beginning and its end.
It is not the tense to describe 'the way things were' or 'the way we used to do
things' - we'll tackle that another day.
Regardons la formation.
Let's look at how it's formed.
le passé composé
«Avoir» The past participle of the
in the present tense verb you wish to conjugate
J'ai acheté.
I have bought.
J'ai téléphoné.
I have telephoned.
The present tense of the verb avoir you should know by now:
avoir - to have
le présent de l'indicatif
We looked at past participles when we studied the passive form. To form them, you
need to know which group your verb comes from.
For the verbs in Group One, you form the past participle by replacing the -er
ending of the infinitive with -é. The infinitive and the past participle are pronounced
the same:
acheter acheté
aimer aimé
téléphoner téléphoné
So putting the present tense of avoir with the past participle we get le passé
composé:
le passé composé
For verbs in Group Two (verbs with an infinitive ending in -ir and -iss in the stem
of the nous form), we form the past participle by replacing the -ir of the infinitive
with -i:
finir fini
choisir choisi
For the irregular verbs in Group Three there are no hard and fast rules for forming
the past participle. It's just a question of learning by practice.
dormir
sometimes it is -u:
tenir
voir
sometimes -ert:
ouvrir
comprendre
Then we have:
faire
être
avoir
Learning le passé composé is extremely important (we're not quite finished - there
are a dozen or so verbs that are formed with the present tense of être not avoir,
but we'll deal with those another time). So take your time to go back over this
lesson and make sure you have it all sorted out.