Grammaire: Les adverbs de temps

(adverb of time)

Adverbs of time tell when an event occurs.

They are also called “locutions adverbials de temp” especially when they are made up of more than one word.

Here is a list of the common ones.

Note that adverbs of time can be classified into three different groups.

Those tht indicate the past

Those that indicate the present

Those that indicate the future

Exercise

Classify the adverbs in the table into three groups

Present

Past

Future

Make fifteen (15) sentences

Five (5) sentences for each category:

Examples

Je suis a l’ecole maintent (present)

Je suis alle au marche hier (Past)

J’irai a paris a l’annee Prochaine (future)

L’imparfait

The French imperfect tense is mainly used to talk about things that used to happen regularly in the past. E.g. j’allais chaque annee en vacances.

To form the imperfect, we use the ‘nous’ form of the “present tense” and remove the ONS. To this stem, the following endings are added

Je                    ais

Tu                   ais

Il                      ait

Elle                  ait

Nous              ions   

Vous               iez

Ils                    aient

Ells                  aient

Note:   There are exception for verbs such as “etre” whose stem is et – “manger” whose stem is “mang” and not “mange” ranger whose stem is “rang” not “range”.

It is also worth while to know that for verbs like “Commencer”, the last – C – changes to – C – before vowel letters – a – o and u.

Example: In nous commencons” the stem of the verb is commenc “and not “commen”

DEVOIR
Faites des excercises suivantes

Fill in the gaps with the correct imperfect tense.