The past: recounting yesterday
The passé composé. Two ingredients — a helper verb and a past participle — and suddenly you can talk about anything that has already happened.
Colours live this week
10 of 10 in playA thing, a person or a place.
An action or a state — what is happening.
Describes a noun.
Modifies a verb or an adjective.
the / a / some — and possessives like mon, ma.
Stands in for a noun — I, you, he, it.
Links words together — to, in, of, for.
Joins two parts of a sentence.
Opens a question — where, when, how, why.
Learn it whole. Do not take it apart.
Past participles are verb forms, so they stay green. Where one agrees with the speaker, bold and slanted show that agreement — the speaker's own gender, not a noun's.
How it is built
Two ingredients: avoir or être in the present, plus the past participle. Most verbs use avoir. A small group of motion and state verbs use être instead, and those are the ones where the participle changes to agree with you.
Seven participles that use avoir
Learn each one already attached to j'ai — that is how you will actually say it, and it saves assembling the sentence under pressure.
- J'ai parléI spoke
parler → parlé
- J'ai faitI did / I made
faire → fait
- J'ai vuI saw
voir → vu
- J'ai prisI took / I had (food or drink)
prendre → pris. J'ai pris un café is what you say for I had a coffee.
- J'ai mangéI ate
manger → mangé
- J'ai buI drank
boire → bu
- J'ai achetéI bought
acheter → acheté
The être verbs, where the participle agrees with you
A short list of motion and state verbs takes être rather than avoir. When it does, the participle grows an -e if the speaker is female.
| Verb | Participle | If you are male | If you are female |
|---|---|---|---|
| aller | allé | Je suis allé | Je suis allée |
| venir | venu | Je suis venu | Je suis venue |
| rentrer | rentré | Je suis rentré | Je suis rentrée |
A different job for bold and slanted
Everywhere else in this system, bold and slanted tell you a noun's gender. Here they are doing something else: they show that the participle is agreeing with the speaker. Same two channels, one extra thing they can mean — and only ever on a green participle after être. If you are a man, use the bold form throughout. If you are a woman, use the slanted one.
When it happened
- [hier]yesterday
- [ce matin]this morning
- [hier soir]last night
Literally yesterday evening.
- [la semaine dernière]last week
Sentence frames
- 1
[Hier], j'ai mangé au café.
Yesterday I ate at the café.
- 2
Je suis allé / allée à Paris.
I went to Paris.
Pick your form once and stick to it — it should become automatic.
- 3
Qu'est-ce que vous avez fait [hier] ?
What did you do yesterday?
Worth learning whole. It is the question you will be asked most often.
Daily mini-tasks
Listening this week
InnerFrench — an episode on daily routine or past events
Podcast apps
Listen for the j'ai… and je suis… patterns. You now know them, so they will start jumping out of the stream.