Past Tenses

This unit covers the perfect tense with avoir and être, regular and irregular past participles, reflexive verbs in the past, the imperfect tense, and choosing between the two.

The perfect tense is the priority, and the être verbs are where marks are won and lost. Their past participles agree with the subject, so elle est allée takes an extra -e, and forgetting that agreement is among the most visible errors in written French. The imperfect is more regular than the perfect, since almost every verb builds it from the nous form of the present. Choosing between the two comes down to whether an action was completed or ongoing, and questions often signal which through words like soudain or toujours.