To be able to use passé composé, you need to be very good at conjugating (changing the endings of the verb to match the person who is doing the action) the French verbs être - 'to be' and avoir- 'to have'.
This post is going to explore verbs which use avoir in past tense, so let's recap how to conjugate avoir to match the person who is doing the action:
J'...ai- I have (the e of je has been replaced with an apostrophe because the verb begins with a vowel)
Tu...as- You have (singluar informal)
Il...a- He has
Elle...a- he has
On..a- One has
Nous avons-We have
Vous avez- You have (plural/formal)
Ils...ont- They have (Group of males/mixed group)
Elles...ont- They have (Group of females only)
So since you are familiar with conjugating avoir, you can now learn how we use the verb avoir to make up sentences in the past tense. Passé Composé has three main components: the verb (i.e. the thing action that was done in the past), the connecting verb (either avoir or être In English we usually don't use a connecting verb) and the person or object who was doing the action.
The first step to constructing your sentence is to work out who did the action. For example if we wanted to say 'You ate the apple', we would begin our sentence with 'tu'. If we were talking about an object or an animal, we could use a noun instead of a pronoun. For example, we might say 'The dogs' or 'The telephone'.
Once you know who committed the action, you can build the next layer of your sentence. This layer involves using a connecting verb. Although some verbs use the word étre, these are exceptions, and are explored in the next post. In this lesson, we're going to focus on regular verbs, so we'll be using avoir as the connecting verb.
Let's start with 'er' verbs.
To use the connecting verb, we simply take our pronoun or noun and conjugate the connecting verb to match. So if we took our sentence 'You ate the apple', we would match tu with as. This would give us Tu as- 'You have'. The verb 'have' followed by another verb is a bit like the English sentence, 'You have eaten the apple.' In French, though, this way of speaking, using "have' to designate past tense is a lot more common than in English, which is why it can be translated as 'You ate the apple'.
If we were using a noun such as les chiens- 'the dog' or la porte- 'the door', we would still conjugate the verb avoir to match the relevant pronoun. So for les chiens, the relevant pronoun is ils, as it is a masculin plural noun. This means we would begin the sentence with 'Les chiens ont'. With the noun le téléphone we would use 'Le téléphone a' as we would be conjugating for the pronoun elle.
As you can see, we still need to add the important part of the sentence- what was it that you, the dogs and the door have done?
Just like we modify the verb 'to eat' into 'ate' or 'have eaten', we also need to change the French verb to show that it is in past tense. For verbs ending in 'er', the verb is changed by dropping the 'er' at the end of the infinitive verb and adding an 'é'.
For example,
manger (to eat) → mangé
frapper (to hit) → frappé
aimer (to like) → aimé
aider (to help) → aidé
cacher (to hide) → caché
If we were to use the word penser (to think), we would drop the 'er' so we were left with the stem 'pens' and then add the ending 'é' to give pensé.
Once you've determined how to modify your verb into passé composé simply add it to the rest of your sentence!
To finish our sentences from before, could have the following:
Tu as mangé la pomme- you have eaten/you ate the apple
Les chiens ont eschappé- the dogs have escaped/the dogs escaped
Le téléphone a sonné- the phone has rung/ the phone rang
And that is passé composé for 'er' verbs!
Hint: I find it easier to think of my sentence as 'I have run' when I'm building it, but when I'm translating it, I find it usually makes more sense if I think of the sentence as 'I ran'.
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