Thursday, March 5, 2015

Reviewing French Tenses

Hello!/ Bonjour!

In post we will take a very simple English sentence, translate that into French, as well as putting it in all the tenses that we've learned so far. I think that it is very important to see all of the tense together in order to easily differentiate them. But the most important part of verb tenses is knowing when to use them. What situations do I match with what.
 
So these are a list of the verb tenses that I have learned so far, and reviewed on this blog:

1. Present tense
2. Immediate Past tense
3. Passé Composé
4. The Imperfect tense (L'imparfait)
5. Recent Future (Futur Proche)
6. Future tense
7. Conditional tense

Sentence: You (talking to a friend) play soccer. In French: Tu joues au foot. Now I will re type up 1-7 and put this sentence in all 7 tenses.

1. Tu joues au foot.
2. Tu viens de jouer au foot.
3.  Tu as joué au foot.
4. Tu jouais au foot.
5. Tu vas jouer au foot.
6. Tu joueras au foot.
7. Tu jouerais au foot.

Now that we can write these 7 tenses, the most important part of all is understanding the purpose of the different tenses. In my opinion the best way to go about this is to directly translate all 7 sentences back into English, this way we can understand the purpose.

1. You play soccer. (This is pretty basic, it's not in the future or the past, it's currently happening).
2. You came from playing soccer/ You just played soccer. (This is past, but shortly after it happened.)
3. You have played soccer/ You did play soccer/ You played soccer. (Past tense, completely happened. This is generally not right right after the event, but later that day, week, etc.)
4. You were playing soccer. ( This a repeated action in the past. Also descriptions, and emotional thoughts, such as "vouloire".)
5. You are going to play soccer. (This is a future event that is shortly going to happen.)
6. You will play soccer. (This is something that is going to happen, could be a year, 10 years, but WILL happen.)
7. You would play soccer. (Conditional is generally paired with an "if" clause. "You would play soccer, if you could". Just remember that conditional is always "would".)

Hopefully this post helped you review your French verb tenses. As I've said before these are extremely important to understand and know if you want to survive Paris.  Please leave a comment if you have and questions, or if you're confused about anything.

Thanks!/ Merci!

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