French Past Tense Explained with Easy Animations

Welcome to French grammar! Today we'll learn about the passé composé, the most common past tense in French.The passé composé is used to describe completed actions in the past. It's formed using two parts.Before we look at examples, let's understand how to form past participles for regular verbs.Most French verbs use avoir as their auxiliary verb. Let's look at some examples.Some verbs, particularly those involving movement or change of state, use être instead of avoir.Let's review the conjugations of avoir and être that we'll need to form the passé composé.Let's practice transforming a sentence from present to past tense.In French, most verbs use avoir in the passé composé, but a special group uses être instead.These special verbs are remembered using the mnemonic DR MRS VANDERTRAMP.Verbs used with être must agree in gender and number with the subject.For feminine subjects, we add 'e'.For masculine plural, we add 's'.And for feminine plural, we add both 'e' and 's'.Most other verbs use avoir and don't need gender agreement.Let's compare être and avoir verbs side by side.Now let's explore some common irregular past participles in French.Let's start with the pronunciation of these irregular forms.These irregular verbs follow certain patterns that can help us remember them.Let's see how these verbs are used in everyday situations.Let's look at a few more common irregular past participles.