Forms  Passé composé Pluperfect Past Conditional    Exercises

Compound Tenses

Tense is the form a verb takes to indicate a particular time period. Roughly speaking, the tense indicates whether something happened in the past, the present or the future. The tense structure of French is quite similar to English, though there is no perfect one-to-one correspondence of one tense to another. 

Tenses are simple or compound, depending on whether the tense is indicated by an ending on the verb itself (simple) or by an Auxiliary Verb (compound). 

Simple: Elle va, nous allons, ils allaient, elles iront

Compound: Elle est allée, nous serions allés, il était allé

We shall be limiting ourselves in this section to three compound tenses, whose salient features and equivalents in English are shown below. The tenses we will deal with here are the passé composé, the pluperfect and the past conditional.

about Simple Tenses.

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Forms

These tenses are called "compound" because they are made up of two parts: the past participle of the verb, usually ending in -é, -i or -u, preceded by different tenses of the verb avoir (to have) or être (to be). 

The Auxiliary verb avoir is used with most verbs to form these tenses. Être is used with most verbs of movement, a few others, and with all Pronominal Verbs.  When reading, you need to be careful not to confuse tenses with être as the auxiliary (il est allé = he went) with the normal use of the verb to be (il est ridicule = he is ridiculous).

Passé composé 

Il a mangé, a fini, est allé

(he ate, has eaten; finished, has finished; went, has gone...)

Elles ont mangé, ont fini, sont allées 

Pluperfect (Plus-que-parfait) or Past Perfect 

Il avait mangé, avait fini, était allé

(he had eaten, had finished, had gone)

Elles avaient mangé, avaient fini, étaient allées  

Past Conditional 

 Il aurait mangé, aurait fini, serait allé

(he would have eaten, would have finished, would have gone)

Elles auraient mangé, auraient fini, seraient allées

about the Conditional.

Examples 

Le Mexique a tout de suite signé l'accord.

Mexico signed the agreement at once. 

Il avait attendu jusqu'au dernier moment.

He had waited until the last moment. 

Si la société torontoise n'avait pas emprunté en dollars américains, elle aurait perdu moins d'argent.

If the Toronto firm had not borrowed in American dollars, it would have lost less money. 

Note that the two parts of the compound tense may be separated by negatives (pas) or adverbs (tout de suite). 
 

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Exercises