Passé composé, passé simple, imparfait and plus-que-parfait are the four most common past tenses in French, though passé simple is used in writing only.

Passé composé

It is a compound tense--it has two parts. The first is the auxiliary verb, the second is the past participle. Every verb has one past participle that does not change (there are some exceptions, as one will learn later).

There are two auxiliary verbs: avoir and être. One must only conjugate the proper auxiliary, and then merely add on the past participle.

To find the past participle, the stem of the infinitive must be determined. To do so, drop the -er, -ir, -oir or -re, as usual. Then, add an ending as shown in the following table:

However, the verbs avoir, être, and faire have irregular past participles.

Most verbs form the passé composé with avoir, however there are a small number of verbs that are always conjugated with être. The most common are:

Passé simple

Unlike English, there is a literary past tense, used when writing formally. This past tense is named the passé simple. It is relatively simple to predict when to use this tense; for every occurrence of the passé composé in conversational French, one simply uses the passé simple in literary French.

To conjugate in this tense, one finds the stem and appends the following, as according to the table:

Imparfait

In order to congugate the imperfect,

• take the 1st person plural of the verb you want to conjugate:

jouer (to play)

• Remove the -ons ending to find the stem, and add these endings:

Plus-que-parfait

The plus-que-parfait is used when there are two occurrences in the past and one wants to symbolise that one occurrence happened before the other. In English, this is used in a phrase like "I had given him the toy before he went to sleep." In this example, there are two past tenses, but they occur at different times. The plus-que-parfait can be used to indicate the occurrence of one before the other.

In French, the plus-que-parfait is formed by conjugating the auxiliary verb in the imparfait and adding the past participle. So to conjugate je mange (I eat) in the plus-que-parfait, one finds the appropriate auxiliary verb (avoir), conjugates it (avais) and finds the past participle of manger (mangé). So, the conjugation of Je mange in the plus-que-parfait becomes j'avais mangé or, in English, I had eaten.

Examples

Grammar - Object Pronouns

Direct Objects

While the subject of a sentence initiates an action (the verb), the direct object is the one that is affected by the action. A direct object pronoun is used to refer to the direct object of a previous sentence:

The following table shows the various types of direct object pronouns:

Notes:

• The pronoun form with an apostrophe is used before a vowel.
• The direct object pronoun for nous and vous is the same as the subject.

Indirect Objects

An indirect object is an object that would be asked for with To whom...? or From whom...?. It is called indirect because it occurs usually together with a direct object which is affected directly by the action:

The following table shows the various types of direct object pronouns:

Notes:

• The pronoun form with an apostrophe is used before a vowel.
• The direct object pronoun for nous and vous is the same as the subject.

The bread is given by the man (direct). Pierre gets the given apple (indirect).