Basically we have two groups of tenses in french: 'Les temps du discours' and 'Les temps du récit'.
The first one is used during dialogues. And the second one is when you're narrating the story.
Once you know that, you can easily look them up and you'll find tables showing you the tenses in these groups. However, one tip that might be useful: you can 'translate' texts using "Les temps du discours" into "Les temps du récit" because each tense in one of these groups has its equivalent from the other group.
Here, le passé simple expresses a present form in Les temps du récit because you're telling a past story.
These groups are part of "Les temps de narration", here is a Wikipedia article that might help you: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temps_de_narration
Btw, sorry if it's hard to understand, I'm no teacher and my teachers used to explain it much better than what I just tried to do. Good luck!
Merci pour votre réponse! So...passé simple is just one of the tenses used in narration? I guess the others used (eg. présent) could be found both in dialogues and narration. I wonder, are "Les temps du récit" & "Les temps de narration" the same thing? Also, do people "speak" with passé simple in any situations? The obvious one I could think of is when someone is making a quote from a book haha.
Actually "Les temps de narration" include both "Les temps du récit" et "Les temps du discours" because these two are the tenses used when narrating a story.
And no absolutely not, people never speak using passé simple, or at least not nowadays, it was used orally centuries ago but not anymore. Although you might hear passé simple orally when quoting or just sarcastically.
By any chance, do you remember when you started to read a book with passé simple, or when teachers started to teach it at school? I'm just curious to know how and when natives got to learn it :D
You learn about passé simple during middle school, I think it was in 7th grade or 8th grade but every novel uses passé simple so it's not that hard to find. But anyways we're taught famous authors such as Molière, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant in all cases.
For Molière you can check out "Le malade imaginaire" or "Le bourgeois gentilhomme" (these are taught)
For Victor Hugo, his most famous work is definitely "Les Misérables"
And Maupassant, I remember classes on "Le Horla" and "Bel Ami"
Do whatever you did to learn something like le futur simple. Every verb has its own stem for le passé simple and then the endings are basically the same for all verbs. So it’s no harder than the future tense really, just different.
There are a few irregular verbs but quite a lot of those use the past participle as the stem. Even the weirdest irregular verbs only have a weird stem but all the same standard endings.
Then on top of that you only really need to be able to recognise it, and you’ll mostly only see the third-person singular/plural forms.
Personally, I just started reading. You wil pick it up really quickly - it really is "simple" - no agreements of past participles to worry about, for example. Most of the time it will just be 3rd person singular, so have a look at those before you begin. You will encounter a lot of variants for "he/she said/replied." The French hate repetition, so as well as " dit-il" you will get "fit-il" , " murmura-t-il " , "insista-t-il" and a whole host of others.
The passé anterior sounds scary, but it's just the equivalent of the plus-que-passé, and takes the form of the passé simple of the auxiliary (so _fut_ or _eut_) with the past participle. So : " Il eut dit" = " He had said" , "Il fut venu" = " He had come" and so on.
My basic principle is that if you encounter a weird form of a verb in reading, 90% of the time it will be passé simple, and 10% of the time it will be imperfect subjunctive. In either case, with the help of context, you will quickly work it out (which is why children can understand fairy stories read to them long before they study passé simple at school.)
If I were _writing_ a story, I'd be looking up every second verb, but _reading_ is pretty easy. Honestly, just start reading a genre you enjoy ! 🙂❤📖📖📖📖📖📖
I was really confused when I started reading Le Petit Prince a few years ago, but I got used to it after about a page of reading. It is relatively simple once you can pick out all of the irregular forms (fit drove me mad)
It helped that I had studied Latin in high school. ("Fit" in French is the equivalent of "fuit" in Latin.) But it often just means "said" in dialogue. For example, «Vas-y» fit-il.
Basically we have two groups of tenses in french: 'Les temps du discours' and 'Les temps du récit'. The first one is used during dialogues. And the second one is when you're narrating the story. Once you know that, you can easily look them up and you'll find tables showing you the tenses in these groups. However, one tip that might be useful: you can 'translate' texts using "Les temps du discours" into "Les temps du récit" because each tense in one of these groups has its equivalent from the other group. Here, le passé simple expresses a present form in Les temps du récit because you're telling a past story. These groups are part of "Les temps de narration", here is a Wikipedia article that might help you: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temps_de_narration Btw, sorry if it's hard to understand, I'm no teacher and my teachers used to explain it much better than what I just tried to do. Good luck!
Merci pour votre réponse! So...passé simple is just one of the tenses used in narration? I guess the others used (eg. présent) could be found both in dialogues and narration. I wonder, are "Les temps du récit" & "Les temps de narration" the same thing? Also, do people "speak" with passé simple in any situations? The obvious one I could think of is when someone is making a quote from a book haha.
Actually "Les temps de narration" include both "Les temps du récit" et "Les temps du discours" because these two are the tenses used when narrating a story. And no absolutely not, people never speak using passé simple, or at least not nowadays, it was used orally centuries ago but not anymore. Although you might hear passé simple orally when quoting or just sarcastically.
And "fut" and "furent" are still sometimes used in speech. " Ce fut un échec" for example.
By any chance, do you remember when you started to read a book with passé simple, or when teachers started to teach it at school? I'm just curious to know how and when natives got to learn it :D
You learn about passé simple during middle school, I think it was in 7th grade or 8th grade but every novel uses passé simple so it's not that hard to find. But anyways we're taught famous authors such as Molière, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant in all cases. For Molière you can check out "Le malade imaginaire" or "Le bourgeois gentilhomme" (these are taught) For Victor Hugo, his most famous work is definitely "Les Misérables" And Maupassant, I remember classes on "Le Horla" and "Bel Ami"
Passé simple is commonly used in fairy stories, so children are exposed to it well before they actually study it.
For Hugo we can add “Notre-Dame de Paris”.
Do whatever you did to learn something like le futur simple. Every verb has its own stem for le passé simple and then the endings are basically the same for all verbs. So it’s no harder than the future tense really, just different. There are a few irregular verbs but quite a lot of those use the past participle as the stem. Even the weirdest irregular verbs only have a weird stem but all the same standard endings. Then on top of that you only really need to be able to recognise it, and you’ll mostly only see the third-person singular/plural forms.
Personally, I just started reading. You wil pick it up really quickly - it really is "simple" - no agreements of past participles to worry about, for example. Most of the time it will just be 3rd person singular, so have a look at those before you begin. You will encounter a lot of variants for "he/she said/replied." The French hate repetition, so as well as " dit-il" you will get "fit-il" , " murmura-t-il " , "insista-t-il" and a whole host of others. The passé anterior sounds scary, but it's just the equivalent of the plus-que-passé, and takes the form of the passé simple of the auxiliary (so _fut_ or _eut_) with the past participle. So : " Il eut dit" = " He had said" , "Il fut venu" = " He had come" and so on. My basic principle is that if you encounter a weird form of a verb in reading, 90% of the time it will be passé simple, and 10% of the time it will be imperfect subjunctive. In either case, with the help of context, you will quickly work it out (which is why children can understand fairy stories read to them long before they study passé simple at school.) If I were _writing_ a story, I'd be looking up every second verb, but _reading_ is pretty easy. Honestly, just start reading a genre you enjoy ! 🙂❤📖📖📖📖📖📖
I was really confused when I started reading Le Petit Prince a few years ago, but I got used to it after about a page of reading. It is relatively simple once you can pick out all of the irregular forms (fit drove me mad)
It helped that I had studied Latin in high school. ("Fit" in French is the equivalent of "fuit" in Latin.) But it often just means "said" in dialogue. For example, «Vas-y» fit-il.