Holiday Activities: Grammar and Phonics (AQA GCSE French): Revision Note

To get the highest marks in the exam, you need to be able to use and understand three time frames - past, present and future. The perfect tense is essential to describe past holiday activities, and can be used across all of the topics that you study. Let's look at this key tense in more detail.

Perfect tense

• Use the perfect tense to refer to the past, e.g. ‘I went to France’

• In French, the perfect tense has three parts:

  • noun or pronoun

  • auxiliary verb (a form of avoir or être)

  • past participle

Past participles

• Most verbs have regular past participles which are formed as follows:

• Some verbs have irregular past participles

• They do not follow the pattern above, so need learning separately

• Here are some common irregular past participles:

Auxiliary verbs - avoir

• Most verbs use avoir as their auxiliary verb:

Auxiliary verbs - être

• A small number verbs use être as their auxiliary verb

• They are generally verbs of movement, e.g. ‘to go’, ‘to leave’

• All reflexive verbs use être as their auxiliary verb

• Some common verbs in this group are:

• Their past participles agree with the subject in number and gender:

• To form perfect tense sentences, combine the three parts - noun or pronoun, auxiliary verb and past participle:

  • J’ai joué dans la mer

    I played in the sea

  • Nous sommes allés en Suisse

    We went to Switzerland

  • Mes parents ont commandé des boissons froides

    My parents ordered some cold drinks

Holiday activities: phonics

• [oi] and [oy] are different sounds in French. Compare:

  envoyer 

  voyager

  soir

  mois

• [é], [-er] and [ez] are the same sound in French. Compare:

  je suis allé

  je vais manger

  vous sortez