Grammaire 1: passé composé avec avoir (participes passés réguliers)
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On étudie !
Le passé composé
In order to talk about things that happened in the past, French speakers use two tenses, the passé composé and the imparfait. You do not yet need to distinguish between these two tense. We will focus first only on the passé composé which is used to talk about actions (or states) that were completed at a specific, defined time in the past. For the next three weeks, you will learn how to form it and use it. It is the tense commonly used to tell what someone did at a certain time.
Just as its French name suggests, the passé composé is “composed” of parts: the (1) auxiliary verb (verbe auxiliaire) and (2) the past participle (participe passé) of the main verb. The main verb is the action you’re talking about; the auxiliary verb is the “helping” verb that tells us that it’s a past action. Once you understand how these parts work together, you are good to go!
| French | English |
|---|---|
| J’ai dîné au restaurant hier soir.
Ma mère a fini un projet important. Les étudiants ont travaillé dur ce week-end. |
I ate at the restaurant last night.
My mother finished an important project. The students worked hard this weekend. |
As you can see, the French verb has two parts, which translate to ”I have eaten, she has finished, they have worked” in English. However, while the passé composé occasionally does correspond to this usage of English, the most common and basic usage of the passé composé correspond to the simple past in English, i.e., ”I ate, she finished, they worked”.
La formation du passé composé
To recap, the passé composé is composed of two parts:
auxiliary verb (helping verb) + past participle of the main verbauxiliaire + participe passé |
The helping verb, l’auxiliaire, must be conjugated to agree with the subject of the sentence. Most verbs in French use avoir as the auxiliary verb while a few use être. We refer to these verbs as ”avoir verbs”. You already know how to conjugate avoir in the present tense:
AVOIR IN THE PRESENT TENSE
| j’ai | nous avons |
| tu as | vous avez |
| il, elle, on a | ils, elles ont |
So all you need to learn in order to form the passé composé correctly is how to form the past participle. This is very simple with regular verbs! Les participes passés (past participles) of a regular -er verb are formed by replacing the -er ending of the infinitive with -é, regular -ir verbs with -i and regular -re verbs with -u.
PAST PARTICIPLES OF REGULAR VERBS
| -er verbs → é | -ir verbs → i | -re verbs → u |
|---|---|---|
| parler → parlé | choisir → choisi | attendre → attendu |
| étudier → étudié | finir → fini | perdre → perdu |
| habiter → habité | réussir → réussi | répondre → répondu |
La conjugaison de 3 verbes réguliers au passé composé
While the participes passés (past participles) of the 3 regular verbs in the table below stay the same, you will notice that only the avoir auxiliary (part one of the verb) changes depending of the subject pronoun:
| PARLER | CHOISIR | ATTENDRE |
|---|---|---|
| j’ai parlé | j’ai choisi | j’ai attendu |
| tu as parlé | tu as choisi | tu as attendu |
| il, elle, on a parlé | il, elle, on a choisi | il, elle, on a attendu |
| Nous avons parlé | Nous avons choisi | Nous avons attendu |
| Vous avez parlé | Vous avez choisi | Vous avez attendu |
| Ils, elles ont parlé | Ils, elles ont choisi | Ils, elles ont attendu |
Additional examples of regular verbs to expressed past actions:
| infinitif →participe passé | verbe au passé composé | anglais |
|---|---|---|
| habiter → habité | J’ai habité à Toronto pendant 3 ans. | (I lived in Toronto for 3 years.) |
| finir ➔ fini |
Donia a fini ses devoirs. |
(Donia finished her homework.) |
| perdre ➔ perdu |
Tu as perdu tes clés? |
(You lost your keys?) |
A few important notes:
(a) As you’ve probably guessed already there are a number of irregular past participles. We will see those in next section.
(b) To make a verb negative in the passé composé, place ne, n’ and pas around the conjugated form of avoir (not after the past participle):
| J’ai oublié son anniversaire. | (I forgot her birthday.) |
| ➔ Je n’ai pas oublié son anniversaire. | (I didn’t forget her birthday.) |
| Elle a acheté des baguettes ce matin. | (She bought some baguettes this morning.) |
| ➔ Elle n’a pas acheté de baguette ce matin. |
(She did not buy baguettes this morning.) |
(c) To form questions, you must always keep the subject and the auxiliary verb together. Compare:
- Inversion: Avez-vous parlé avec Sarah?
- With Est-ce que : Est-ce que vous avez parlé avec Sarah?
(With inversion, you do not place the subject after the past participle Avez parlé-vous…).
(d) Adverbs of time like hier (yesterday) or avant-hier (the day before yesterday), or any other reference to a past time (ce matin, samedi dernier, etc.), help contextualize the passé composé. You can hear the pronunciation of these useful expression in the vocabulary section.
Vocabulaire utile pour parler du passé
| Français | Anglais |
|---|---|
| hier | yesterday |
| avant-hier | the day before yesterday |
| samedi dernier* | last Saturday |
| la semaine dernière* | last week |
| l’année dernière* | last year |
*dernier (last) is an adjective and must agree with the noun it modifies. All months and days are masculine, including weekends (le week-end dernier).
Regardez ces vidéos pour savoir plus sur le participe passé et le passé composé avec avoir.
