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Imparfait, Passé Composé and Passé Simple | ||
Tags: Verbs/Conjugation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Français |  | |
| Tiramisu Soup Newbie Sweden Joined 4554 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English | Message 1 of 6 19 June 2012 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, coming from a newbie, here is a question regarding distinctions that were never properly made plain and clear to me in school and was always a headache to me. When is it appropriate to use Passé Composé and when is it appropriate to use Imparfait in verb conjugation. I have come across several contradicting statements regarding this, with my original teachers telling me that the former was for more recent events in the past, while the latter was for events further back. I've later learned that apparently, Imparfait is for events that may still be ongoing and being ambiguous in its beginning and end, while Passé Composé is for events that are clear and distinct in these regards.
I am thus appealing to the vast bank of information available on this forum for help and guidance. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5545 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 19 June 2012 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For a nice discussion of the passé composé and the imparfait, see
this page. Basically, the passé composé is used for either instantaneous actions or actions of fixed duration, and the imparfait is used for ongoing, interrupted or repeated actions. The passé simple is used by the "narrator" in fiction, in more or less exactly the same places that you'd use the passé composé in speech. So typically the dialog in a book will use the passé composé and the imparfait, and the narrator will use passé simple and the imparfait. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but this should get you started. Fortunately, the passé simple is pretty easy, and you'll get lots of chances to practice it if you read fiction. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| scarlett Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4890 days ago 19 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 3 of 6 20 June 2012 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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what about the imparfait subjunctive? does anybody use it in actual speech? it looks
terribly ugly in print...il a fallu que je parlasse, ugh... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tiramisu Soup Newbie Sweden Joined 4554 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English | Message 4 of 6 20 June 2012 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks, the website seems to have done the trick. A lot of training will of course be needed before I can use it flawlessly, nevertheless, this seems like the perfect reference I was looking for to aid my studies. I'm probably not the first one who, knowing only English and Swedish, finds the French' extensive usage of the present perfect tense (granted, formally speaking, it is slightly different than the present perfect in Swedish and English) very annoying.
Well, that's where I stumbled upon it. I've gotten myself a copy of my favourite book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in French, and when I tried to read the first chapter, I found the grammar... very odd. Looking it up, I came across passé simple, a tense that, despite five whole years of French education in school, was never even once mentioned. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5545 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 20 June 2012 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's dead in speech, and very nearly dead in writing. It appears occasionally in Le Petit Prince and in older literature, but even French speakers think it sounds deeply weird, or so they keep telling me. :-)
As far as I can tell, the passé composé was once a present perfect. But now it's just an ordinary past tense. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to conjugate.
Ouch, that's educational malpractice. After 4 or 5 years of French, they should be encouraging you to read real books. And that means spending, oh, a single class teaching you 4 verb endings and 10 or 20 irregular stems. I've actually become rather fond of the passé simple. It has a certain fairy- tale quality to it, or a hint of "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…" I was watching Buffy contre les vampires, and Giles (the English librarian) was explaining how demons once ruled the Earth long before the arrival of the human race. Of course, he told this story using the passé simple. And it just worked perfectly. So yeah, French has a verb tense just for telling stories. It's one of those fun little quirks. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tiramisu Soup Newbie Sweden Joined 4554 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English | Message 6 of 6 21 June 2012 at 12:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, when it comes to the education in the place I was from (one particular suburb of Sweden), they had very different attitudes in teaching French and teaching English. In English, learning it was serious business, we were informed from first day that this was a language we needed to learn if we wanted to survive out there, and that lacking fluency in the language was on the same level as being illiterate among adults today. So they actually had us reading Dickens in the original language by grade 7. In French... the attitude was more lax, it was almost a space-filling class, where you got the impression that the teacher, however nice she was, that most of her students were never really going to learn French, nor really would ever need to know it. And consequently, the pace was much, much slower. I've heard that at other places in Sweden, the B-language education is apparently much better, but this was the case where I grew up. I've actually become rather fond of the passé simple. It has a certain fairy- tale quality to it, or a hint of "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…"
Wow, really hope one day I'll too be able to notice and appreciate French' subtleties. One final question, should I for future questions on French and French grammar post here, or should I post in Questions about your Target Language? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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