Describing activities in the past (useful verbs)

To write about actions which have taken place at some point in the past, you need to use the perfect tense. To form the perfect tense, you need to adopt the following formula:

Person + Part of avoir / être + Past participle of the verb describing the action itself. We will now consider each of these parts in turn.

• Person:

This can be je tu il elle etc., or could be a noun such as "le train".

• Part of avoir / être:

You must include the part of avoir or être which corresponds to the subject used. For example, for an "avoir" verb, the part of the verb corresponding to "ils" is "ont". For example

Ils ont trouvé leurs clés – they found their keys.

• The past participle:

This is a special spelling of the verb used to describe actions that have taken place in the past.

To form the past participle:

-er verbs: take the "r" off the end of the infinitive and add é jouer - joué
regarder - regardé
aller - allé      

-ir verbs: take the "r" off the end of the infinitive:
partir - parti
sortir - sorti

-re verbs: take the "re" off the infinitive and add u
descendre - descendu

Additionally, there are several verbs whose spelling do not follow this rule. You can find a list of these at the end of this section.

So, to recap, you need to know 3 things to form the perfect tense:

• The person (who is involved)

• The part of "avoir" or "être" which corresponds with the person

• The past participle of the verb describing the action.

Applying these principles:

The person is easy- you just write down who is doing the action.

The part of "avoir" / être" is more difficult. Firstly, you need to know which one the verb takes. As a general rule, there are only 13 verbs in the whole of the french language which take "être" – the rest all take "avoir". There are exceptions to this rule, but we do not need to worry about this for now.