Taking a Look Back: The Past Tenses - Trong phần này, bạn nhìn vào làm thế nào để hình thành thì quá khứ trong tiếng Pháp: không hoàn hảo, sáng tác lạc hậu (hợp chất vừa qua), đại quá khứ, đơn giản và lỗi thời (quá khứ đơn giản). Bạn có thể sử dụng các thì quá khứ để kể lại, hoặc mô tả các sự kiện trong quá khứ, chẳng hạn như thời thơ ấu của bạn, trường trung học của bạn prom, kỳ nghỉ cuối cùng của gia đình của bạn, hoặc thậm chí bộ phim, bạn. | Part III Taking a Look Back The Past Tenses In this part. B umankind can t live on bread alone and a language isn t nearly as interesting or as complete if it has only one tense. Think of the confusion just one tense could cause how would you tell your friends whether you re waiting for them at the restaurant now will be waiting for them later or were waiting for them earlier In this part you look at how to form the many past tenses in French the imperfect the passé compose compound past the pluperfect and the passé simple the simple past . You can use these past tenses to recount or describe events in the past such as your childhood your high school prom your family s last vacation or even the movie you saw last weekend. Sometimes you may even want to explain the sequence of past events those that happened prior to other past events. That s why you need all those different past tenses all of which are introduced in this part one by one. So go ahead reminisce You can do it with the past tenses. Chapter 11 No Tense Is Perfect The Imperfect Tense Jn This Chapter Forming the imperfect with regular irregular and pronominal verbs Using the imperfect tense o you ever get nostalgic about the past Do you want to be able to say what you used to do when you were a child to describe a wonderful family tradition or to recall how blue the sky was on your favorite vacation Well you can with the imperfect tense. You use the imperfect tense to describe a continuous or habitual action in the past or an action that you did a nonspecific number of times. The English translation of the imperfect is was doing something used to do something or would do something in the past. Note One of the translations of the imperfect tense in English is would. However this translation isn t the same as the would of the conditional tense which expresses the present and the future. An example of the would in the imperfect is Quand j habitais à Paris je prenais souvent le métro When I lived in Paris I .
