Tenses

I'm trying to really improve my French and get one step ahead to make the most of my summer before I start AS in September but I'm struggling to understand the tenses in the tables given in my French dictionary.

Hopefully some of you more advanced learners can point me in the right direction by defining the following tenses:

past historic, pluperfect, past anterior and future perfect.

and also these other confusing words: indictive, imperative, conditional, participle :redface:

Reply 1

Richy Rich$$

Right a lot of these phrases can be very complicated at first and it'll take a while to get used to them. Most concerns topics above A level standard, but i'll try my best to explain.

Past Historic- It's basically a fancy name for the normal past tense, however its a literary tense past tense i.e. used in old novels instead of normal past tense. So to write "I went" you would write- "j'allai" instead of je suis allé

Pluperfect describes events that happened further back in the past. So essentially its just another past tense. The difference;

I have played tennis- j'ai joué au tennis (Just normally past tense)
and
I had played tennis (this is further back in the past so you use the pluperfect)- j'avais joué au tennis

Past anterior- is just a literary name for pluperfect- e.g j'eus joué, but rarely ever seen nowadays, only in old formal french will you find this!

Future perfect translates into English as, "I will have done/played/gone etc"
Its just the future tense of avoir/etre as an auxiliary(like in the difference between je suis allé and j'ai joué0 plus the past participle.
So "I will have gone"= je serai allé

Indicative tenses are the opposite to the subjunction "tenses". Dont worry about this word, its just a category which all the tenses you know so far fall into. So past tense, future tense are all indicative

Imperative is when you give an order like" Parlez-moi!" etc.

Conditional is a tense where you express something conditionally (Sorry that's a bit tautological).
For example- I would go, I would do, I would see, are all conditional.

Participle- there are 2 types. A past participle which you need to form the past tense. Like in "j'ai parlé" and "je suis allé", "parlé" and "allé" are past participles. Present participles are similar, which i say tentatively, to the english -ing verb forms. But its a bit complicated for me too explain at midnight now!

Sorry my definitions are a bit confusing, but it's actually quite hard to explain these things. Most likely you will pick up this terms passively as you go along.

Reply 2

garethDT

Thanks for taking the time to explain that. At least I've got a long time to get my head round it lol.

And French is the easy language, German is going to be daunting!

Reply 3

kellywood_5

garethDT

Thanks for taking the time to explain that. At least I've got a long time to get my head round it lol.

And French is the easy language, German is going to be daunting!

It would probably help you to learn the pluperfect and conditional tenses before September, but they're pretty straightforward anyway. The pluperfect tense is just the imperfect tense of avoir for regular verbs and etre for irregular, so j'avais, tu avais, il avait, nous avions, vous aviez, ils avaient or j'etais, tu etais, il etait, nous etions, vous etiez, ils etaient, plus the past participle. The conditional tense is just the future stem, ie the infinitive for re and ir verbs or the infinitive minus the e for re verbs, plus the imperfect tense endings, ie ais, ais, ait, ions, iez, aient.

I don't think you really need to worry about the other things because they'll be taught to you at A-level. Future perfect and conditional perfect are easy enough because it's just the future/conditional tense plus the perfect tense, so you don't need to learn anything new. You definitely don't need to learn the past historic or past anterior yet- I haven't done them yet and I've just started A2!

Reply 4

Yttrium

kellywood_5

You definitely don't need to learn the past historic or past anterior yet- I haven't done them yet and I've just started A2!

They're useful to recognise, especially if you're doing a literary coursework or taking the AEA or extended writing papers...

(imperfect subjunctive too)

Reply 5

Allyria

I have a semi-related question: To say something in the imperative, do you just put the normal present tense of the verb into the vous form? Or do you use the subjunctive? Or do you do something different from either of these? I've been told different things by all my teachers!

Reply 6

Richy Rich$$

imperative is just the normal past tense, but it can be in tu, nous and vous form

Parle-moi- informal- tu form (without s)
Parlez-moi-formal- vous form
Parlons- Lets talk- nous form

The subjunctive imperative has a different meaning.-"Let him/her/them do something". This is always prefixed by "que".

So if you wanted to say, "let them speak" you say

Qu'ils parlent!

Or "let him be" is

Qu'il soit!

Reply 7

kellywood_5

Yttrium

They're useful to recognise, especially if you're doing a literary coursework or taking the AEA or extended writing papers...

(imperfect subjunctive too)

I'll be reading some literature over the summer, so I'll probably learn the imperfect/pluperfect subjunctives, past anterior and past historic, otherwise the books may not make much sense! I don't think there's any point learning them before you've even started AS though.

Reply 8

Richy Rich$$

There are actually not to bad to learn. Pluperfect subjunctive, past anterior are both compound tenses, so no new endings to learn! And i have rarely ever seen the imperfect subjunctive except in the oldest of texts.

Reply 9

kellywood_5

Richy Rich$$

Good good

It'd probably be worth learning them anyway just in case I get any obscure questions involving them in my Cambridge interview/test, and I know for a fact I won't be taught them at school considering the rest of my class have yet to master the basic GCSE-level tenses! Plus I actually enjoy learning grammar....I probably shouldn't admit to that, but hey, I'm weird :p:

Reply 10

garethDT

So will I be doing much literature at A-level? (AQA I think) and as I have a lot of time on my hands is it worth attempting to read any particular books?

Reply 11

Richy Rich$$

At AS you wont do any literature. At A2 you might, but i dont know because i dont do AQA. You might have a choice between coursework or literature. I wouldn't think about literature yet, it might be a bit daunting and off putting. The best reading practise would be newspapers and any articles you find eg. www.lefigaro.fr and www.lemonde.fr

Reply 12

Richy Rich$$

kellywood_5

Good good