Following on from my last blog, I thought it was about time I looked back, and took on the passé composé - apparently, the most-used past tense in French (oh yes, there are many...)
The passé composé - or, as it was called when I was in school, the perfect tense - describes an action from the past that has finished. Grammatically speaking, it is perfect. It is a compound tense, which means it is made up of two parts - an auxiliary verb, and the past participle of the main verb.
The what?
Well, remember when I was rambling about the Present Tense, and said that avoir and être are probably the most important verbs in the French language? That's because they're also the auxiliary verbs that are used in all compound tenses. So if you're looking to express yourself in the passé composé, or the pluperfect, or the past subjunctive, or any other compound tense, you need to know both of these verbs inside-out!
Here, though, we're only talking the passé composé - for this, we'll need the present tense of the auxiliary verbs, so let's remind ourselves of those conjugations here:
Wonderful. Next, we'll need the past participle of the verb we want to use in the past tense.
So, as we know, French verbs are either regular or irregular, and some of those irregular verbs are really irregular. This is true of their past participles, as well - although it might please you to know that even some irregular verbs form their past participles in a more regular manner. Anyway! Take a look at the below table to see how the past participle is formed for regular verbs from across the three groups:
As you can see, the first group (-er verbs) drops the ending and adds -é to the stem; the second group (-ir verbs) drops the final 'r', and the third group (regular -re verbs) drops the ending and adds -u. Quite straightforward, really. It only gets tricky when you have to remember that a verb like 'courir' (to run) is an irregular verb, and its past participle is not 'couri' but 'couru'. I have yet to find a good way to remember which verbs are irregular besides memorizing lists, but if I ever do come across such a thing, I'll be sure to let you know!
But what about the auxiliary verbs?
In French compound tenses, it can be difficult to know which verbs require which auxiliary, but there are strict rules on this, so don't worry.
1. First of all, the vast majority of verbs take avoir as their auxiliary. So taking 'finir' from the example above; if we want to say "I have finished", that is "J'ai fini". It's as simple as that.
2. The next broad rule to remember is, all pronominal verbs - that is to say, verbs that come with a pronoun, be it reflexive or reciprocal, or some other sort of thing - all take être. The most often-used pronominal verbs are reflexive verbs, where you talk about an action that reflects back on the subject. Getting up in the morning, getting dressed, brushing your teeth - all of these verbs are, when most often encountered, reflexive. For sure, you can get someone else up, you can dress someone else, but usually you will talk about dressing yourself, or brushing your own teeth. In the dictionary, these verbs will have the pronoun 'se' in front of them - 'se lever' (to get up), 'se laver' (to wash oneself), 's'habiller' (to get dressed).
So, to say "I got dressed", as in, you dressed yourself, that is "Je me suis habillé" - because s'habiller is a regular first-group verb, and the only thing you need to concern yourself with here is the reflexive nature of it, requiring the pronoun 'me' (it literally means "I got myself dressed", we just don't emphasize the reflexive nature in English).
3. Okay, so finally we have the more complicated rule. There is a group of around 25 verbs that take être in compound tenses, with various mnemonics out there to aid in remembering them. To be honest, though, I have more trouble trying to remember mnemonics than just going from a straight-up list!
The sixteen verbs above are the main bunch, but there are a further nine verbs that share a common stem to these, and just add "re-" to the start to show a repeated action:
In grammatical terms, these verbs are all "intransitive" - that is to say, they do not need (and cannot take) a direct object to complete the thought. Discussions of direct objects are best saved for a blog on Pronouns (which I am planning, don't worry!) but suffice it to say, you can say "I was born" without needing to add any further people into the sentence. If thinking of transitive and intransitive verbs is a bit much, think of them as involving movement - though when all else fails, remember that all verbs in the dictionary will have either VT or VI next to them, to indicate how they are used. Handy hint for you, there!
There is also an exception to this - as always!. Décéder (to pass away) is a very formal verb that isn't as often encountered as mourir for the same sentiment.
As if all of this isn't bad enough, five of those verbs in the table above can be used transitively - that is to say, they require more than just the subject of the verb to express a thought. These verbs have a different meaning when used as such, and take avoir as their auxiliary:
So if you want to say "I went upstairs", it's "je suis monté l'escalier", while "I put the tent up" would be "j'ai monté la tente".
I mean, all of this is pretty high-level stuff, let's be honest! Let's get back to the passé composé...
So we have the majority of verbs in the past tense taking avoir as an auxiliary verb. Those verbs where the action reflects back on the subject, and those verbs involving movement, take être as an auxiliary verb.
Going back to our examples of past participles up top there, in the past tense we have j'ai regardé (I watched), j'ai fini (I finished), but je suis descendu (I went down).
Agreement
Ah yes, there are more problems to overcome!
See, past participles are often required to agree with their subject, such as is the case with those verbs requiring être as an auxiliary (but pronominal verbs are a very special case - this blog is already getting long and confusing, so we'll cover this another time!). For example, as a gentleman I would say "je suis allé" (I went), but if I were talking about my other half, it would be "elle est allée", because she's female. Jolly good.
However, those verbs taking avoir require agreement with any preceding direct object. Let's look at this example: "Voilà l'erreur que j'ai faite" (here is the error that I made). L'erreur is feminine singular, and so the past participle (fait) needs to agree with it, so we add an 'e' to the end there.
All of this is fairly high-level stuff once again, and probably something that I'll cover in the future, but it's definitely something that we need to be aware of!
But what is it used for?
I said at the start of this post that, when I was back in school, this was called the perfect tense - perfect being the grammatical term for "complete". An action that you did, either once or a defined number of times, is expressed through the passé composé.
So:
- j'ai bu du café ce matin (I drank coffee this morning)
- j'ai bu du café trois fois la semaine dernière (I drank coffee three times last week)
Where things might get confusing is the frequency with which the passé composé is used alongside the imperfect tense. Most commonly, the imperfect is used to give context to a past action, as in "something was happening when something else happened". The imperfect tense is what "was happening" and the passé composé is what "happened".
- il pleuvait quand j'ai bu du café ce matin (it was raining when I drank coffee this morning)
It's definitely the sort of thing that gets easier to handle over time! I've said it before on this blog, but having studied French at GCSE level has really helped me in certain aspects, and the passé composé is one of the more obvious ones. Somehow, I managed to not only get a very high mark at GCSE, but also at A level, with only ever having studied the passé composé, the imperfect, and the future tenses. Nowadays, it seems folks are doing all sorts, even the subjunctive, as part of their school studies! While I may lament the shortcomings in my own education in this way, there's no doubt that spending two years working on the two main past tenses has given me a solid grounding for when to use each one (though I'll still slip up, don't get me wrong!)
Practice, as they say, makes perfect!
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