L’imparfait is also used to talk habits or repeated actions in the past. L’imparfait d’habitude (l’imparfait of habits): We travelled, laughed, talked, and lived without any worries).ĭo you see why l’imparfait is the perfect tense to talk about your memories? So touching. Everything was so simple when we were young. My father played with us and took us everywhere in his car. My mother cooked all the dishes we liked. (When I was young, I loved to be on vacation. Nous voyagions, rions, parlions, et vivions sans aucun soucis. Tout était très simple quand nous étions petits.

Mon père jouait avec nous et nous emmenait partout avec sa voiture. Ma mère cuisinait les plats qu’on aimait. Quand j’ étais petit, j’ aimais beaucoup avoir des vacances.

Les murs étaient bleus et la maison sentait l’océan (the walls were blue and the house smelled like the ocean).Elle était belle comme un jour ensoleillé (she was as beautiful as a sunny day).You can describe a landscape, the occurrence of a certain chain of events, or the traits of a person. L’imparfait descriptif (the descriptive imparfait):.Since you know now how to form verbs in l’imparfait, let us see its different usage in details. In fact, être (to be) is the only verb that has an irregular stem in l’imparfait. The good news is, there aren’t many exceptions. It’s no rocket science, once you understand the rule and learn the endings of imparfait, you can form any verb you want. We say “Nous apprenons” in the present tense.

Now let’s take one final example with a third group verb apprendre (to learn). We say “Nous finissons” in the present tense. Let’s take a second group verb finir (to finish). To that, we add the endings presented above, which gives us:Įasy Peasy ! Here is another example. The underlined syllable in bold is the root of the verb. In the present tense we say “nous allons”. We conjugate l’imparfait by adding the following endings to the root of the present tense nous form of the verb:įor example: the verb aller (to go). It is also used for description in the past. However, l’imparfait is mainly used to talk about a repeated or continued action in the past. It is mainly a tense that we use a lot in our daily conversations. So if you have already read our previous article about le passé composé, you will remember that it is used to talk about almost anything that had happened in the near past. Otherwise, why would we have two past tenses that can be used interchangeably? It is certainly not for the beauty of the language (well, technically, if we’re being honest, it does add to the complexity and charm of the language, but let us not get off track here). So if you want to talk or describe what was going on at an indefinite time in the past or what used to happen repeatedly, use l’imparfait!īefore we dive into the different usages of l’imparfait and the way we form it, let us first understand the difference between le passé composé and l’imparfait. In other words, l’imparfait expresses or describes continued, repeated, habitual actions or incomplete actions, situations, or events in the past. It is generally used to describe things or actions in the past, and to talk about actions having taken time in the past, like a habit. L’imparfait is the second most used past tense in the French language - Le passé composé being the first.

Future stem plus imparfait endings