bonjour do you get confused with your tenses in French do you know your pass compos from your imper 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 M to eat and I will show you what this verb looks like in different tenses on this timeline let's start with the present or the present tense and add this to our timeline is the present of 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 there is only one 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 for imperative tense this represents an order it's happening right now too so as an order using the verb you would say and because it's happening right now I want to add it exactly where the present tense is is because it's happening here now it's an order another present form is the present progressive which uses the formula this does not mean you are in the 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 so we would say and if you want to conjugate this you say I am because to be so we are conjugating it so M 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 imper this tense is used for an ongoing action that started in the past and carried on over for a period of time in English it is used this way you would say I was eating or I used to eat as an habit in French we would use only one way we would [Music] say and that equally translated as I used to eat or I was eating the arrow means that though the ction started in the past it carried done for a while after that I used to eat chips every Wednesday after school for example would be translated as this action started in the past but went on every Wednesday until it stopped hence why we are using the imper I 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 passic compos 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 to compos why is it called a compound tense because it's composed of two things an auxiliary verb either a or and a p participle I teach you how to use the passive compos 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 T so the I and then the auxiliary have and then eaten for that verb okay so we would say 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 and and compos che check it out it's awesome another past tense which not many people know but can very be very very useful is the pass or recent past using to eat a 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 V which is to come and the preposition D which is of okay or I have just eaten see how we're using V in the present tense weirdly enough to represent the past tense I know it's crazy so the plus the INF represents but on its own is I come okay so you use that as a I come in the present tense but add the preposition and the infinitive suddenly it becomes a b if you're enjoying this video please like the video that will help me a lot mer let us now travel further back and look at the or perfect this tense represents an action further back in the past before the pass compos in English it is I had eaten in French so we're using theath the I had so it is an action that happened in the past of the past for example I had already eaten with when you arrived two past tenses are used here can you see that now let's have a look at the other side the future future let's attempt to place the future P 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 Al to go to form this tense so the phrase I am going to eat will [Music] be knowing Al in the mces will be a savior so please check this video out about the verb Ali and how to conjugate it and use it in a future Pro so what about the future sample you may ask the equivalent in English is I will it is used to talk about farway activities in the future using to eat and the model will in English it will be I will it however in French we don't do that we don't have a model will and so instead we are adding special endings to represents the future tense in that case we would say a i m and that indicates the future samp I'm to finish with one last future tense and this is the future anterior this tense is used to talk about a certain action that will happen by a certain time in the future okay the future anterior is the equivalent of the future perfect in English so it would be I will have eaten in French it would be now remember we don't have the model 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 plus participle it is also used to predic or make suppositions about what may have happened in the past it goes just before the future but after the future p 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 use 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 learnfrench withth alexa.com I did not talk about the other tenses conditional subjunctive Etc as today's main objective was on the indicative tenses the tenses expressing a certainty okay that's it for me