The verbs that take AVOIR

In an earlier note I suggested that if you quail at the thought of the Passé Composé you could squeeze by using the Present tense – One day this guy comes up to me and says…. This note is for those who have a bit more ambition and want to be a bit more naturally French in their use of the language. After all, in real life other people are going to use all these tenses when they talk to you, and it is much more difficult to understand what they are saying if you don’t have some grip on how they work. And as a lot of conversation is talking about things you did or others did to you, the Passé Composé is used a lot.

For most verbs, the two bits it’s made of are 1) the Present tense of AVOIR plus 2) a thing called the Past Participle. You don’t say “ The dog bit the cat “, but rather “ The dog 1) HAS 2) BITTEN the cat ” – The chien 1) A 2) MORDU le chat. The Present Tense of “avoir” is something you just have to learn, but there are rules (and, of course, exceptions) about making the Past Participle.

For –er verbs it’s simple. Take the infinitive MANGER remove the –ER = MANG then add É = mangé. It sounds the same : marnjay. This works 100% of the time! So I ate = J’ai mangé.

For –ir verbs, most of them just drop the R on the end, so FINIR becomes FINI. (fee knee) This works about 80% of the time. The most obvious exception is Ouvrir (ouvert) and it’s little family, offrir (offert), given away, souffrir (souffert) suffered , couvrir (couvert) covered and découvrir (découvert) discovered. But there is also venir (venU) come and it’s mate: tenir (tenU) held, and a large number of verbs based on them too long to list here!

For –re verbs it’s a bit more hit and miss. Most of them drop the RE and replace it with U. So VENDRE becomes VENDU (varn dew) – as you’ve seen on houses in the good old days. This only works about 40% of the time, as a lot of RE verbs have hang-ups of their own!

The most notable exception to the RE rule is a word used a lot: Prendre (to take) and its family of similar words – apprendre, comprendre, entreprendre, surprendre. Their Past Participle ends in “Pris” – J’ai pris un sandwich (I had a sandwich) Il m’a compris (He understood me) Ça m’a surpris (That surprised me).

Verbs ending in OIR are all completely unpredictable, and you just have to know their past participles. Mind you, a lot of them end in –U, so if you make up a word a bit shorter than the verb itself and end it in U, you will probably get away with it or be corrected!

If you read my earlier note on verbs (who says they are hard?) I said you only need to know the forms for je, nous and ils and all the rest was easy. Well there are two more bits to know and then you know everything you need about any verb in French except the dreadful four (avoir, être, aller and faire). These two bits are the beginnings of the future and of the passé composé. So, for boire it would look like this:

For almost all verbs, all the other tenses are based on these stems. (For instance, we saw the nous stem gives us the Imperfect stem just take ONS off and add AIS etc)

There in the bottom right-hand corner is the passé composé, there because it tells you the past participle, which can be very unpredictable, and has that bit of AVOIR or ÊTRE – hand on, you said they made it with AVOIR! …. Sadly some are different – more about that next month!