Digital Technology: Grammar (AQA GCSE French): Revision Note

You must be able to use and understand three time frames to access the highest marks in the exam - in speaking and writing to talk about yourself and others, and in reading and listening to understand key information. Let's look at three key tenses in more detail.

Using three time frames

• The three time frames are past, present and future

• There are different tenses for each time frame, e.g. the perfect and imperfect refer to the past, and the near future and the conditional refer to the future

• We are going to focus on the present, the perfect and the near future

Present tense

• Use the present tense to say what is happening now or what happens regularly

• For regular verbs, remove the -er/-ir/-re and add the following endings:

• Irregular present tense verbs need learning separately

Perfect tense

• Use the perfect tense to say what happened in the past

• Use a pronoun or noun with the correct auxiliary verb

• This is a form of avoir for most verbs, and a form of être for a certain group of verbs - you can read more about these verbs here

• Add the past participle:

• Irregular past participles need learning separately, e.g. reçu (received) and suivi (followed)

Near future tense

• Use the near future tense to say what is going to happen in the future

• Use a pronoun or noun with the correct present tense form of aller

• Add the infinitive