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The passé composé is formed by the auxiliary verb, usually the avoir auxiliary, followed by the past participle.The construction is parallel to that of the present perfect (there is no difference in French between perfect and non-perfect forms - although there is an important difference in usage between the perfect tense and the imperfect tense).
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
Imperfect (imparfait), simple Pluperfect ( plus-que-parfait ): literally "more than perfect", formed with an auxiliary verb in the imperfect Simple past ( passé simple ) Conventionally used only in written language (especially in literature) or in extremely formal speech.
French has numerous forms of the past tense including but not limited to: Past perfective (passé composé) e.g. J'ai mangé (I ate or I have eaten, using the form but usually not the meaning of I have eaten) Past imperfective (imparfait) e.g. Je mangeais (I was eating) Past historic or Simple past (passé simple) e.g. Je mangeai (I ate ...
Aside from être and avoir (considered categories unto themselves), French verbs are traditionally [1] grouped into three conjugation classes (groupes): . The first conjugation class consists of all verbs with infinitives ending in -er, except for the irregular verb aller and (by some accounts) the irregular verbs envoyer and renvoyer; [2] the verbs in this conjugation, which together ...
The passé simple (French pronunciation: [pase sɛ̃pl], simple past, preterite, or past historic), also called the passé défini (IPA: [pase defini], definite past), is the literary equivalent of the passé composé in the French language, used predominantly in formal writing (including history and literature) and formal speech. As with other ...
The paradigms for tenses in Ancient Greek are similar to the ones in Latin, but with a three-way aspect contrast in the past: the aorist, the perfect and the imperfect. Both aorist and imperfect verbs can represent a past event: through contrast, the imperfect verb often implies a longer duration (e.g. 'they urged him' vs. 'they persuaded him').
To form the imperfect for French regular verbs, take the first person plural present tense, the "nous" (we) form, subtract the -ons suffix, and add the appropriate ending (the forms for être (to be), whose "nous" form does not end in -ons, are irregular; they start with ét-but have the same endings). Verbs that terminate in a stem of -cer and ...