The Imperfect Tense

Hello everybody!

I seem to spend a lot of time looking to the past on this blog, so I thought today it might be good to continue the work from my previous grammar blog, and look at the other past tense that sees a lot of use – the Imperfect tense.

I think I mentioned this in the last post: grammatically speaking, “perfect” means a completed action, and “imperfect” is an ongoing or continuous action. Well, that’s pretty much what the imperfect tense is used for: actions that were continuous or habitual in the past (generally, if the period of time covered by the action being described is vague). It is also used to describe a state of being in the past, and to describe an action that gives context to another past action, though this one can be a bit tricky. The most common English equivalent is “was”, or “used to”.  

First of all, let’s take a look at how it’s formed.

I’ve seen some guides talk about taking the “nous” stem for the verb in the present tense, and then adding the endings, which is a very handy way of looking at it! As you can see, the three groups of verbs share the same endings, which is a bit better than the present tense! These endings are also used for the irregular verbs, as you can see below, as well as used in the conditional mood (more on this in a future blog!):

Now that I’ve covered how to form the tense, though, let’s get back to talking about how it is used.

As I said in the preamble up there, the most common translation for the imperfect tense in English is “was” or “used to”. However, it’s important to note that you don’t literally translate an English phrase such as “I was watching the birds” word for word, as this is actually an example of the English past progressive, something that doesn’t exist in French. Instead, you conjugate the verb “to watch” in the imperfect tense, which encompasses both the verb itself and the modal “was”. (Modal verbs are used in English all the time, almost as a way around needing the endless sets of verb conjugations we see in romance languages such as French).

“I was watching the birds” does not translate to ‘J’étais regardant les oiseaux’, nor ‘J’étais regarder les oiseaux’. Rather, it’s simply ‘Je regardais les oiseaux’. It’s fairly straightforward, but I remember from my school days that a lot of people struggle with the fact that the “was” in French is subsumed along with the verb you want. Especially when you think that the perfect tense version of this, “I watched the birds”, would be ‘J’ai regardé les oiseaux’ – the perfect tense needs more words than the imperfect, which is the opposite of their English equivalents.

Sticking with our bird-watching example, this brings me on to the next point. As you can see, “I watched the birds” implies the action was a one-off, that I watched them once and then moved on to something else. “I was watching the birds” opens up a different set of possibilities – either I was watching them for a period of eight years, or I was watching them when a car drove into the tree. This shows how the imperfect tense is used in French – to give context to a past action that is itself expressed through the passé composé, or to describe a continuous or habitual action in the past.

As a point of note, the passé composé is still used if you’re talking about something definite in the past. I saw an example online that talked about eating in a restaurant three times. While you might think that’s a continuous or habitual action, the sentiment is that you ate there three times and never again, so it’s a completed action and so needs the perfect tense. If you were more vague, and “used to eat there”, then it’s the imperfect. This can be a little difficult to get used to at first, because it comes down to the difference between a repeated action (which takes the passé composé) and a continuous or habitual action (which takes the imperfect).

Without wanting to get too off-topic here, there is another past tense that can sometimes muddy the waters here, as I said at the beginning. The Pluperfect tense is used to describe a completed action that took place, but has some reference to, a subsequent completed action. When we’re talking about using the imperfect to give context to an action that uses the passé composé, that action must be one that was occurring, not that had occurred. If the action had occurred, then you need the Pluperfect – which will be a separate blog!

The imperfect tense is also used to describe feelings, such as “I was sad” (J’étais triste), as well as some special uses that involve the conditional mood that I don’t want to get into just yet – mainly because I’m still wrapping my head around them, myself!

I do think, though, that the imperfect tense is one of the easier French tenses to understand. If you’re talking about something that happened vaguely in the past, or for a period of time in the past, then you’re using the imperfect tense!