The past tense (passé composé)

Now that you have mastered conjugating verbs in the present tense, you can now start to conjugate them in the past tense, so you can talk or write about things that have happened in the past. The past tense is similar to the present tense in a way that the first and second groups have set conjugation patterns and rules, and the third group is full of irregular verbs that are all conjugated differently.

But the initial construction of a past tense verbs is the same for all three groups.

Firstly, you have to choose a subject pronoun. These should be familiar by now. But just in case you have forgotten: je, tu, il/elle/on, nous, vous and ils/elles.

Next you have the pick the auxiliary that corresponds to the subject pronoun that you chose. The auxiliaries are made up of the verbs avoir and etre, both of which we learnt before. But just in case you forgot the conjugations of etre and avoir respectively are:

Je suis/ai

Tu es/as

Il est/a

Nous sommes/ avons

Vous etes/avez

Ils sont/ont

Avoir is used as an auxiliary for all but a select few verbs. The verbs shown in the photo below all use etre as an auxiliary.

After you have chosen the appropriate auxiliary then you now have to add the actual verb in the form of a "participe passe"

For first group verbs you simply take off the -er ending and add an e with whats called "un accent aigu" which looks like this: é

Some examples of first group verbs conjugaated to the participe passe are:

manger=mangé

parler=parlé

dancer=dancer

jouer=joué

For second group verbs it is even simpler, you take off the -ir ending and simply add i.

Some exmples of second group verbs conjugated to the participe passe are:

Rougir=rougi

finir=fini

Choisir=choisi

As always, third group verbs are never the same. They all have their own rules for participe passe so it is required that you just memorize them.

Some examples of the most important third group verbs in the participe passe are:

Prender=pris

Boire=bu

Voir=vu

Decouvrir=decouvert

Then put the subject pronoun, the appropriate conjugation of either etre or avoir and the participe passe together (which stays the same for all subject pronouns) together to form a passe compose verb.

An example would be j'ai mangé

Now that you have learnt how to talk in past tense, you can plug this into your sentence formula that you just learned. Now you can talk about events that have happened in the past as well as the present.