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fluentu.com/blog/french/french-tenses-explained/
Stay calm.
But it’s important not to freak out, and to take your learningone bite at a time.
Still, it can be helpful to understand why you’re learning them in the first place.
Looking at how the different tenses are actually used can help give meaning to your learning, and save you from feeling lightheaded every time you see a
verb table.
We’re going to take a calm, rational and complete look at all the tenses, right now.
Deep breath.
The French language actually has over 20 tenses (including composite tenses and moods), and most of them were still taught in schools at least until the
early 1970s (though some of them hadn’t been used for many decades even by then).
Today we most frequently use about 12 different verb tenses in French, and in this article I’ll explain those tenses to help you out with your written and
spoken French.
Due to the fact that French literature as late as the 18th and 19th centuries still contains some of those less common tenses, I’ll include some of them
here as well.
Today you’ll get a broad but simplified insight into the French language. I’ll lay out each these tenses in categories, giving you an easy example of each
form in each circumstance.
Since this can get quite complicated for the uninitiated, I’m going to cut it all up in manageable pieces for you, starting with verb forms.
1. L’indicatif (indicative), which includes the most common tenses used to express oneself in everyday spoken and written French.
3. Le subjonctif (subjunctive), which is used to express emotion/judgment and is usually contained in a subordinate clause introduced byque
(that/which).
5. L’infinitif (infinitive), which is just the bare tense of the verb, unconjugated.
6. Le participe présent (present participle), which is just the equivalent of the English “ing” form.
Now, I’ll tell you right away that I’m not going to overwhelm you with a bunch of conjugated verbs.
Instead, I’ll be focusing on how these forms are used in each of their tenses.
But first, let’s take a closer look what these verb forms are all about.
This may seem like a lot, but just hang tight. It’ll all make more sense when we get to the examples.
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One present form.
Five past forms, which areimparfait (imperfect), passé composé (compound past), passé simple (simple past), plus-que-parfait (pluperfect) and
passé antérieur (anterior past).
Two future forms, which are futur (future) and futur antérieur (future anterior).
To keep things (relatively) simple, we’ll stick to the present forms of these last two in this post.
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Bite-sized Pieces: When to Use Each Verb Form
Let’s say you want to say…”I’m eating a baguette”or a variation on that phrase.Here’s how it would vary through the different tenses in the indicative.
The imparfait:
You wouldn’t actually use this last tense when talking to someone (you’d use the passé composé instead), but you might see it in a novel or story.
The plus-que-parfait:
The passé antérieur (the equivalent of the plus-que-parfait that you might run into in literature):
The futur:
The passé deuxième forme (past second form) of the conditional (which is not used anymore in common French):
Easy, right? Looks just like the présent of the indicative of manger. The good news is that the present tense conjugation of -er verbs in the subjunctive is
fairly straightforward. But, as I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a lot more to this subjunctive thing than initially meets the eye.
Most people nowadays would just say, “Il fallait que je mange une baguette.” All that time saved on thinking of the imperfect subjunctive conjugation can
now be spent eating baguettes. A win for all.
You won’t hear these last two tenses in the streets in today’s France, but you’ll encounter them in novels and poetic language.
Now you’ve had a basic overview of the French tenses and what they can express.
Don’t worry if you’re already forgetting the names of those tenses. Even native French speakers do.
The most important thing is to get a sense of how to use the correct form in the right circumstance. Nobody will ever ask you to know what tense you’re
speaking, but they’ll know if you’re not using the correct one.
And as French people like to do, they may even correct you.
But don’t get offended, as this will only help you improve your fluency in the French language!
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