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Things to remember:- The perfect and the imperfect are the tenses which are mostly used.
- The perfect is a compound tense formed with the auxiliary verb and the past participle.
- The majority of the verbs are formed with the auxiliary “to have” followed by the past participle.
- In general there is no agreement between the past participle and the subject except when the direct object is before the auxiliary “avoir”.
- Unlike in English the French language uses the auxiliary verb, “être”, to be, with some past participles.
Indicative tenses: past and future are what the next few sections cover, let's first look at:
Past tenses
In the French language as in English there are different past tenses. Some are used in a similar fashion to the English language.
What are the past tenses in French?
- The perfect
- The imperfect
- The past historic
- The pluperfect
- The future perfect
There is also the past anterior but it is not very often
used so we won’t spend too much time on that particular tense.
The conditional perfect is sometimes perceived as a tense, as part of the indicative but as I consider the conditional as a mood, the conditional perfect will be seen as one of the tenses related to that particular mood.
How are these tenses connected to one another?
Time:
The next section deals with: Past: Perfect