Bonjour! Do you get confused with your tenses in French? Do you know your passé composé from your imparfait?
I guarantee that by the end of this video, you'll be able to understand the weird and wonderful French timeline. Here is a timeline. It goes from left to right, from the past to the future. Let's travel in time together.
To make it easier, we will use just one verb throughout as an example. The verb I want to use is manger, to eat. And I will show you what this verb looks like in different tenses on this timeline.
Let's start with the présent or the present tense and add this to our timeline. Je mange is the present of manger. And it means I eat or I am eating. It represents an action that is happening right now.
It's the present. So not that... But there is only one way of using the present tense in French and not two like in English, like I eat or I am eating.
We don't have a continuous tense, I am eating, but I'm going to show you a trick of how to use a continuous tense in a minute. I want to add two other ways of using the present in French. Let's start with the imperative or imperative tense.
This represents an order. It's happening right now too. So As an order, using the verb manger, you would say mange ou manger ou mangeons. And because it's happening right now, I want to add it exactly where the present tense is, because it's happening.
Here, now, it's an order. Another present form is the présent progressif, which uses the formula être en train de. This does not mean you are in a train, but that you are in the process of. doing something.
So, and this is where I was saying that we don't have a way to translate directly I am eating, but to represent the English continuous sense I am eating in French, we would use être en train de. So we would say être en train de manger, usine manger. And if you want to conjugate this, you say je suis, I am, because être is to be. So we are conjugating it.
So Je suis en train de manger. I am in the process of eating. And that's how we form the continuous tense in French.
Okay, so the present tense will be our anchor for the rest of this video. Now, let us look at the past. Let's start with the imperfect. Or, in French, we say imparfait.
This tense is used for an ongoing action that started in the past. passed and carried on over a period of time. In English, it is used this way.
You would say, I was eating or I used to eat as a habit. In French, we would use only one way. We would say, je mangeais. And that equally translates as I used to eat or I was eating.
The arrow means that though the action started in the past, it carried on for a while after that. I used to eat chips every Wednesday after school, for example, would be translated as Je mangeais des frites tous les mercredis après l'école. This action started in the past but went on every Wednesday until it stopped.
Hence why we are using the imparfait. I cover this tense intensely in many of my videos so why don't you check the links in the description below you will find some very very useful videos. Now let's place the passé composé.
This tense describes a verb in the past as well but represents an action that is over and dusted with by the time you talk about it. It is what we call a compound tense or temps composé. Why is it called a compound tense?
Because it's composed of two things, an auxiliary verb, either avoir or être, and a past participle. I teach you how to use the passé composé in this video over there. In English, there are two ways of using this tense. We would either say I have eaten or I ate. In French, we will only use the compound tense, so the I and the the auxiliary have and then eaten for that verb, okay?
So we would say j'ai mangé. Here it is. It is clearly finished and it's clearly in the past.
Again, there is a video covering the difference between the two tenses, imparfait and passé composé. Check it out. It's awesome. Another past tense which not many people know but can be very, very useful is the passé récent or recent past.
Using to eat as the verb in English, it would be I have just eaten. Do you see that? Why it's called the recent past?
It's just happened. In French, it is used with the verb venir, which is to come, and the preposition de, which is of, okay? Or je viens de manger.
I have just eaten. See how we're using venir in the present tense, weirdly enough, to represent the past tense. I know it's crazy. So venir de.
plus the infinitive represents a passé récent. But je viens on its own is I come. Okay, so you use that as a I come in the present tense. But add the preposition de and the infinitive, suddenly it becomes a passé récent.
If you're enjoying this video, please like the video. That will help me a lot. Merci.
Let us now travel further back and look at the plus que parfait or plus perfect. This tense represents an action further back in the past, before the passé composé. In English, it is I had eaten. In French, j'avais mangé. So we're using the imparfait of avoir.
So not j'ai mangé like in the passé composé, but I had, so j'avais mangé. So it is an action that happened in the past, of the past. For example, I had already eaten when you...
arrived. J'avais déjà mangé quand tu es arrivé. Two past tenses are used here.
The plus que parfait, j'avais mangé, and the passé composé, quand tu es arrivé. Can you see that? Now let's have a look at the other side, the futur or future.
Let's attempt to place the futur proche to start with, or close future. It is used to talk about what you're going to do soon. Just like in English, we use the verb aller, to go, to form this tense.
So the phrase, I am going to eat, will be, je vais manger. Knowing aller in the main tenses will be a saviour. So please check this video out about the verb aller and how to conjugate it and use it in a future proche.
So, what about the futur simple, you may ask? The equivalent in English is, is I will. It is used to talk about far away activities in the future.
Using to eat and the modal will in English it will be I will eat. However in French we don't do that. We don't have a modal will and so instead we are adding special endings to represent the future tense. In that case je we would say mangerai at the end and that indicates the future. simple.
I'm going to finish with one last future tense and this is the future antérieur. This tense is used to talk about a certain action that will happen by a certain time in the future. Okay, the future antérieur is the equivalent of the future perfect in English. So it would be, I will have eaten. In French, it would be, j'aurai mangé.
Now remember, we don't have the modal will at all. So what we need to do is conjugate to have in the future and then add the past participle. So in that case, to have in the future is j'aurais plus past participle manger. It is also used to predict or make suppositions about what may have happened in the past. It goes just before the future, but after the future proche, as it's still a past tense, but in the future.
if that makes sense. Now, remember to comment if you find this timeline useful and how can you use it and have you used the timeline in the past? I want to know. Please comment.
I really hope you love this timeline as much as I love teaching it to you. Remember, please let me know in the comment how you feel about it and why don't you subscribe to learnfrenchwithalexa.com. I did not talk about the other tendencies.
conditional, subjunctive, etc. As today's main objective was on the indicative tenses, the tenses expressing a certainty. Okay, that's it for me.
Au revoir, à bientôt, bisous, bisous.