Transcript for:
Understanding Passé Composé in French

today i am going to introduce you to the first part of a series on passi composi explained to beginners of course so this will show you how to use vase composer if you're a beginner in french and would like to learn about the past tense it's the french past tense used to talk about finished actions in the past okay french past tense used to talk about finished actions in the past actions that are done for example or cinema so how do we form it come for me we take an auxiliary verb an auxiliary verb is either the verb or avoir conjugated in the present tense but why do we call them auxiliary they are called auxiliary verbs simply because we use them to form other tenses and in this case it's going to be passi composi so it's either the verb to be or the verb avoir to have conjugated in the present tense for compose and then to that you add a past participle of the action verb okay so the verb to be how do we conjugate it in the present tense you probably already know it but i am still going to refresh your memory you have your auxiliary verb right here and then right here you have the past participle jo sri zalee o cinema i went to the cinema now the verb avoir the second auxiliary verb j'ai [Music] for example j'monge i ate an apple so what is the past participle the participle it's a word formed from a verb it is used as an adjective or to form a tense like passecompose for example in french they usually end with in english they mostly end with uh idi or en first group verbs how do we form the past participle so first group verbs are regular verbs ending with er like margie shanti don't see well the past participle is going to end with the letter e in the default form the second group verbs will have their past participle and in i so e regular verbs ending with like finier for example and for third group verbs you will have either is u or t i am going to show you a link in the description box of this video that way you will be able to see all of them so how do we know which auxiliary to use cal auxiliary utilize most verbs will use the auxiliary verb avoir to have j'monge to achieve there are also some verbs that will use the auxiliary verb plus their derivatives and of course reflexive verbs that apply to the speaker okay or the subject and we have a method uh there are several methods actually but this is one that i can show you dr mrs van der trump how do you know which verb will use the auxiliary etre so dr mrs van der you're going to use the first letter of dr mrs van der trump and we are going to choose the verbs right here so for doctor we have de venir revenir for mrs monte reste sortiere so for example i'm going to say josue entre now for auxiliar avoir let's get a bit technical here how do we form negation now i'll take you i will let you take a look at these sentences and try to guess uh where to place negation okay the in the negative negative form je ne para mange tu na pas changes or an apostrophe since the auxiliary verb is starting with a vowel and then you have the auxiliary avoir right here and then you have pa right after pa and then the past participle so na auxiliar pa and particip passe one thing that you should know if you are using auxiliar avoir then the past participle will stay unchanged all right it's not going to change je margie now regarding auxiliare etre to be the past participle will agree with the subject's gender and number so what does this mean the subject of the sentence is basically the one doing the action all right if the subject is masculine or feminine singular or plural then the past participle will agree meaning it will also be either masculine feminine singular plural depending on the subject so the past participle will depend on the subject let's see how that works let's take the sentence the subject of the sentence is ill okay and the past participle is sorti the subject is masculine singular right the subject is masculine and there is only one he okay so the past participle is going to be masculine singular as well in the sentence the subject is el the past participle so the subject is feminine and there is only one singular now in this case the subject is ill plural form of the masculine pronoun ill okay the subject is masculine and there are more than one so you add an s same thing for feminine you simply add an s to the feminine form el son subject is el past participle sarti feminine plural there's more than one so you add an s so this is how it should look like ile sorti masculine singular el esorti feminine singular you add an e il sorti masculine plural add an s to the masculine form and elson sorti feminine plural you add an s to the feminine form so in french the gender by default is masculine so if you have a group of for example 10 people and you have nine girls and one boy it's still going to be masculine it's still going to be ill i-l-s to transform in the feminine form you add the letter e to the masculine form okay and to transform in plural you just add the letter s sorti and sorti they have the same pronunciation sorti sorti sorti sorti what makes the difference is when you actually write them down for negative form so in this case the pattern is similar to avoir no auxiliary verb sri alright and and then in the end the past participle however we also have reflexive verbs in french so don't forget to add this reflexive pronoun and things are getting a little bit more complicated but stay with me here this is what it should look like the beginning of your sentence should look like this okay so you have an extra pronoun that you should add after the subject and before the auxiliary verb in this case before reflexive verbs are what applies to the speaker's own self okay but i'm not going to give you a lesson on reflexive verbs today but please note that reflexive verbs will use the auxiliary etre if you are conjugating them in passive composi all right so you have this extra pronoun that you should add me or to apostrophe if it's beginning with a vowel here sir no and please note that the reflexive pronoun is before the auxiliary verb in the negative form this is how you should do it so since we've added the pronoun here okay then i'll let you take a look and maybe if you can write down the pattern genomes triple there you go so what is the pattern well you simply take and then the reflexive pronoun and then the auxiliary and then ba na reflexive pronoun auxiliary power no reflexive pronoun auxiliary okay so the pattern is the same you just need to form sentences i hope you enjoyed this lesson and feel free for more content to visit my website learn2french.com feel free to like and subscribe to my youtube channel learn to french or visit my website learntofringe.com if you want more content for french learners merci beaucoup et a bientot