8. TALKING OF THE PAST: the perfect tense

Some history

Overall, our experience of the weather in Normandy during the month of June has been pretty good. If I’m not in the garden or wandering around the village with a camera around my neck, we’re generally off on a jaunt somewhere. But, when it does rain, I always pull out a previously unread book from the bottom of my suitcase and take great delight in losing myself in it. 

This year, the book in question was a gift from friends who know of my love of France. It is, “France: an Amazingly Short History” by Bob Fowke. At only 128 pages, it provides an amusing and rapid overview of the history of France from 90,000 BC to the present day.

In fact, I became so ingrossed in the book that I started reading out bits to Ken and Sheila. Eventually, when they realised that I was unstoppable, they ‘invited’ me to read aloud a couple of chapters each day, which was greatly enjoyed by all.

If we were to pool all our collective known facts of la belle France, they would probably be quite wide-ranging. Naturally, we had all heard of Joan of Arc (Jeanne D'Arc ), Cardinal Richelieu, Mme Guillotine, Louis XIV or Louis Quatorze) and of course the little corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte. But we were hazy about the details. For example, why was Jeanne D'Arc burned, who set fire to her, what happened as a result and when exactly did all this take place? 

Such questions and more were answered by this excellent little book. We were particularly intrigued by the ‘Maid of Orleans’ because, every May/June in Normandy (and presumably throughout France) posters are much in evidence publicising “le feu’ which is when her conflagration is re-enacted each year. I took the photo (below) at a fête in Saint-Martin-de-Mailloc (on the road from Orbec to Lisieux). The main event was a brocante (see Post 3), followed by a pig-roast and ending with a good-natured conflagration of Jeanne.

All that remained ‘aprez le feu’ 

This year, 2012, is the 600th anniversary of her birth and, a wide range of events took place throughout France to commemorate her life and death, particularly in Normandy, with which she had strong associations.

There were many other fascinating facts to share from Fowke’s amazingly short history. For example, we were already aware that a large townhouse in our very own Leamington Spa bears the name of ‘Napoleon III House’. We then discovered that this Louis-Napoléon (1808-1873), nephew of the ‘little corporal’, Napoléon Bonepart, had lived there for two years during his exile in England. 

Number 6 Clarendon Square, Leamington Spa, where Louis-Napoléon, apparently, eeked out a pitiful exile between 1838 and 1839 (look carefully to see the name, ‘Napoleon III House’).

Like most French rulers, Louis-Napoléon certainly engaged in his share of military conflict. But It turned out that he had been a rather popular emperor who managed to push through a number of important reforms. For example, he was responsible for the creation of those iconic Parisian boulevards–though this was apparently not just to beautify the city but also to reduce the risk of riots by removing the cobblestones (so useful for lobbing at the state troops). These long straight boulevards had the added advantage of allowing his troops clear fields of fire, should the mob decide to turn nasty. Napoleon III was also responsible for the building of new bridges, the opera, and a new water and sewage system.

The perfect tense

And talking of the past, there are two past tenses that you need to know about: the perfect tense (the most commonly used of the two) and the imperfect tense. In this post I’ll look at the perfect tense.

You would use the perfect tense when you’re describing completed events or actions that only happened once or just a few times in the past. For example ‘I ate my dinner’ or ‘I have eaten my dinner’. The imperfect tense construction here would be  “I was eating my dinner”. 

Avoir + participle

For most French verbs, the perfect tense is constructed using avoir + the past participle. For example:
'I have eaten' is: 
J’ai mangé.

The J’ai part is the first person singular of avoir and the mangé is the past participle of manger, to eat. Each of the three common verb types, -er, -ir and -re verbs, has a different participle ending. The table below shows each of these endings, along with an illustration of how they are used.

Using ''avoir':

Infinitive	Participle	Example
parler, to speak	parlé	I spoke slowly.  J’ai parlé lentement.
choisir, to choose	choisi	We chose some pears. Nous avons choisi des poires.
vendre, to sell	vendu	Did you sell an apple? As-tu vendu une pomme?

Être + participle

A small group of verbs are constructed using être + the past participle. For example, I have gone is: Je suis allé.

The verbs in this category (participles in brackets) include:

aller (allé), to go, 

arriver (arrivé), to arrive, 

rester (resté), to stay, 

partir (parti), to leave, 

tomber (tombé), to fall,

naître (né), to be born and 

mourir (mort), to die

A complication with using the ‘être’ construction is that there is requirement to make the participle ‘agree’ with the subject, as shown below.

Using 'être':

Subject	Participle	Examples, showing agreement in red
elle, she	add ‘e’	She went home.  Elle est allée chez lui.
nous, we	add ‘s’	We arrived today. Nous sommes arrivés aujourd’hui.
vous, you	add ‘s’	Why did you (plural) stay? Pourquoi êtes vous restés?
Ils, they (m)	add ‘s’	They fell. Ils sont tombés.
elles, they (f)	add ‘es’	They (female) died. Elles sont mortes.

If this all sounds rather complicated, do take comfort from the fact that, in spoken French, many of these endings are silent, so we’ll probably get away with a few slip-ups – a point echoed by Ken in his ‘gem’ below.

Ken’s Gems

"When speaking French and when you don’t know the gender of a particular verb (i.e. whether or not to use ‘le’ or ‘la’) there is a vocal trick you can employ to get over this. Don’t fully pronounce either. Just let your tongue trip over the ‘l’ without pronouncing the ‘e’ or the ‘a’.  For instance: for 'Je n’ai pas le temps' (I don’t have time) say: 'J’n’ai pas l’temps'. This is only to be employed when speaking - the written form requires more discipline!" Ken

I’ve put up on YouTube a short video that deals more fully with the perfect tense:

Teaching my wife French: 8 The perfect tense.

7. TALKING OF THE FUTURE

Monet's Garden

A great feature of holidays in France is the wealth of happy memories they provide – memories that stay with you long after you have come back home. The other side of this coin is the pleasure of anticipating the next Normandy holiday and before each trip we often play the game of, “This time next month/next week/tomorrow we’ll be doing ...”

One of the most enjoyable trips we’ve made in Normandy has been to Monet’s house and garden in Giverny.

Entering the main gardens

Although Giverny is a fair drive from Tordouet (about 90 minutes each way on a good day) it is definitely a trip that we plan to return to next year. Monet’s house alone is certainly worth the trip but the garden is even more spectacular. 

Those water lilies

Their current head gardener (an Englishman named James Priest) has managed to maintain the overall look and feel of what the garden must have been like in Monet’s time there (1883-1926) while still managing to avoid turning it into a fossil. 

Here’s a link to a short clip from an excellent BBC documentary about the gardens, broadcast in August 2011.

More water lilies

One striking image that I still remember from the Monet gallery is the great man wearing thick-lensed glasses and peering intently just a few inches away from the canvas he was working on. Particularly in his later years, his vision was greatly reduced, due to cataracts in both his eyes. Apparently, after being fitted with a pair of glasses to correct his severe astigmatism, he flung them away saying, 

“If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”  

Monet's Water Lilies, painted in 1916

It is possible that the swirling images with its rather garish colours that he created of the water lilies in his garden may indeed be what he was actually seeing from that bridge.

Ken, Sheila and Rosie on Monet's bridge

The future tense

It was the wish of Sheila, Ken and myself to be able to speak French using tenses other than the present, that really kick-started this blog in the first place. In this post, I’ll cover the future tense.

There are basically two ways to speak in the future: 

* using the construction ‘I am going to xxx’ or perhaps ‘I want to xxx’;

* using a future tense verb ending.

(a) I am going to, I want to 

Rather than saying ‘I will visit Monet’s garden’, you could simply reorganise the sentence as:

I’m going to visit Monet’s garden. Je vais visiter le jardin de Monet.

or

I want to visit Monet’s garden. Je veux visiter le jardin de Monet.

There are still other possibilities here, such as:

 ‘I hope to visit Monet’s garden.’ J'espère visiter le jardin de Monet.

or 

 ‘I would like to visit Monet’s garden.’ Je voudrais visiter le jardin de Monet.

But whichever way you choose to say it, the word ‘visit’ is always given in its infinitive form, to visit – visiter.

(b) Using the future tense verb ending.

It turns out that, with a couple of exceptions, this ‘verb ending’ approach is easier than it might be. There are two basic steps.

Step 1: take as the stem the infinitive form of the verb (except in the case of -re verbs, drop the final ‘e’)

Step 2: for the six conjugations, add these endings:

ai, as, a, ons, ez, ont.

Examples:

Infinitive	Stem	Example
parler, to speak	parler-	I will speak slowly.  Je parlerai lentement.
choisir, to choose	choisir-	We will choose some pears. Nous choisirons des poires.
prendre, to take	prendr-	Will you take an apple? Prendras-tu une pomme?

There are some irregular verbs that don’t use the infinitive as the stem but something else instead. However, the good news is that they do use these same endings as the regular verbs – ai, as, a, ons, ez, ont.

Examples: 

Infinitive	Quirky stem	Example
aller, to go	ir-	I will go to Tordouet.  J’irai à Tordouet.
avoir, to have	aur-	We will be hungry. Nous aurons faim. *
être, to be	ser-	You will be tired. Vous serez fatigué.
faire, to do	fer-	She will do nothing. Elle fera rien.

* Note that in French ‘I am hungry’ translates as ‘I have hunger’, so the verb here is avoir, not être.

Ken’s Gems

"The French sometimes use the present tense to express the future using only inflection to indicate this: ‘Je vous appelle demain’ – ‘I you call tomorrow’,  ‘Je vous vois ce soir’ – ‘I you see this evening’, where we would say ‘I’ll call you tomorrow’ , ‘ I’ll see you this evening’. Interestingly you can sometimes hear native French speakers with a good command of English use this in everyday speech when speaking English – 'I see you tomorrow!' When I look at how these two simple sentences are structured it helps me to learn and better understand the French language. This is very useful and interesting when looking at future tenses. In French, for instance, ‘I leave tomorrow’ or ‘I will leave tomorrow’ is contracted from its French origins of:  “Je partir ai demain” – “I to leave have tomorrow” to “Je partirai demain – I shall (will) leave tomorrow” by adding ‘ai’ (in this example) to the infinitive.  For tu, il/elle, nous, etc, you then add the relevant endings:  “Tu partiras demain”, “il partira demain”, “nous partirons demain”, etc  ..." Ken

Video

I’ve put up on YouTube a short video that deals more fully with the regular –ir and -re verbs in the present tense:

Teaching my wife French: 7 Talking of the Future