Kilo Lingo

Ch 1 · Lesson 8

Passé composé vs imparfait

Grammar for AP French.

The short version

Imparfait sets the stage, acts

, .

When I arrived, Marie was sleeping.
Why?

The bedrock of French narration is one sentence carrying both tenses. The ongoing background goes in the imparfait and the event that cuts across it goes in the . , : my arrival is the event, her sleeping is the scenery.

Some verbs change meaning with the tense

2010.

I met my wife in 2010.
Why?

A handful of common verbs mean different things in each past tense, and that is semantic work, not style. Marie is I knew her; Marie is I met her. is I knew, is I found out. , , and all shift the same way.

If English could say used to, it is the imparfait

.

I used to play in the park on Saturdays.
Why?

Check for a reason not to use the . Could English say used to or was ...-ing, or is it a description? Then it is the imparfait. An event that happened and is over takes the , and time words settle most choices: and for the , and for the imparfait.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

Read the full article · 3 min read

Practice

Practise this lesson

10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 28 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 8 of 14 in this chapter

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