Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to form the passé composé for verbs that take “avoir” as their auxiliary.

Lesson Explanation

The passé composé is the most common way to express a completed past action in spoken French, formed with an auxiliary verb (Part 1, Lesson 3) plus a past participle.

Most verbs use avoir as the auxiliary. Regular past participles follow predictable patterns by conjugation group (Part 1, Lesson 4): -er verbs end in -é (parler → parlé), -ir verbs end in -i (finir → fini), and -re verbs end in -u (vendre → vendu).

Combined: J’ai parlé. (I spoke/have spoken.) Tu as fini? (Have you finished?) Elle a vendu sa voiture. (She sold her car.)

A genuinely important set of irregular past participles must be memorized: faire → fait (done/made), prendre → pris (taken), voir → vu (seen), être → été (been — genuinely important, since “être” itself typically uses “avoir,” not “être,” as its own auxiliary), avoir → eu (had).

Object pronouns from Part 2, Lesson 6 go before the entire avoir + participle unit: Je l’ai vu. (I saw him/it.) A genuinely important rule, covered fully in the next lesson but worth previewing now: when a direct object pronoun precedes an avoir-auxiliary verb, the participle must agree with it — vu would become vue if “l'” referred to a feminine noun.

Practice Questions