The passé composé is used in French in answer the question ‘What happened?’ On the other hand, you will usually put a verb in the imparfait if it answers the question ‘What was going on when something else happened?’
Generally, the passé composé is used to relate events while the imparfait is used to describe what was going on in the past, states of being in the past, or past habits.
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imparfait (set scene)
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passé composé (event)
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Avant, Tammy habitait à Fort Worth …
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et puis un jour, elle a déménagé.
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Usually, when verbs like être, avoir, pouvoir, vouloir, and savoir are in a past narration, they will be in the imparfait, since they most likely describe a past state of being or condition.
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Quand j’avais 15 ans, j’habitais à Fort Worth.
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When I was 15, I used to live in Fort Worth.
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This all goes to explain why J’étais is usually better than J’ai été. For more see frenchgrinds.ie
The topic of agreement is at the core of any writing or speech in French. So…what does this mean ?
Let’s compare it with English…our first language. English doesn’t care at all whether a car is masculine or feminine – cos its neither!. It’s neutral. So we can say – the big car. The word big NEVER changes. Even if we talk about two cars we say – the big cars. All very simple.
In french every time the noun changes, the words associated with them (adjectives) also must change.
So we say – la grande voiture……les grandes voitures. Notice we don’t say la grand voiture.
Because its la voiture., i.e. feminine, any word associated with this noun must also be feminine.
This is what we mean by agreement. If the noun is feminine, any other words with it are feminine.
Thus, if a word is plural voitures, then grand becomes plural. So we say – les grandes voitures.
So the word “grand” must agree with voitures – so it must become grandes.
There are several ways in which this agreement can be seen.
- J’aime les grandes voitures : I like the big cars.
- J’aime des grandes voitures : I like some big cars.
- Je trouve que les voitures sont trop grandes aujourd’hui.
- Je vois la voiture. Elle est trop grande.
To check this out further see the article on www.frenchgrinds.ie about agreement.
We are looking at issues using NanoGon and Moodle.
