Lesson 14: Introducing the Passé Composé

The passé composé is one of the main tenses used to talk about the past in French. It presents an action or event as completed: something began, happened, or came to an end.

It is especially useful for one-time events and sequences of completed actions. When telling a story, the passé composé often moves the action forward: the day you climbed that mountain, the moment the door opened, or when you heard that unforgettable song on the radio.

The passé composé is made up of two parts:

• a conjugated form of avoir (to have, as a helping/auxiliary verb), and
• the past participle of the action verb.

Avoir tells us who does the action and when it happens; the past participle tells us what the action is.

When translated word for word, the passé composé reads as the present perfect tense in English. J'ai fini ma soupe can be read either as "I finished my soup" (English past tense) or as "I have finished my soup" (English present perfect). The precise meaning depends on context. The present perfect tense doesn't actually exist in French, so don't go looking for it!

Here are some examples of past participles in English:

As you can see, English has past participles that are formed regularly by adding ‑ed (talked, lived) and irregularly (eaten). French also has regular and irregular past participles. Let's start with the regulars.

Finding regular past participles is a simple process—just drop the infinitive ending and add the participle ending for that verb group:

Now that we know what the past participle is, it's time to put it to use! To form the passé composé, follow these three steps:

Most French verbs form the passé composé with avoir. Here are its present-tense forms:

Now let’s apply the pattern to our three regular verbs:

Below are some examples of the passé composé in action: