Welcome to this deck on the pluperfect tense in French, or 'le plus-que-parfait'. This is a key tense for Higher Tier students. We use it to talk about an action in the past that happened before another action in the past. For example, in English we might say, 'I had already finished my homework when my friend called'. In this deck, you'll learn how to form and use this tense confidently.

Forming the pluperfect tense is straightforward if you already know the perfect tense, or 'passé composé'. It has two parts. First, you take the auxiliary verb, which is either 'avoir' or 'être', and you put it into the imperfect tense. Second, you add the past participle of the main verb. The rules for choosing between 'avoir' and 'être' are exactly the same as for the perfect tense.

Let's start with verbs that use 'avoir'. First, you need to know the imperfect tense of 'avoir'. The forms are: j'avais, tu avais, il avait, elle avait, on avait, nous avions, vous aviez, ils avaient, and elles avaient. Then, you just add the past participle. For example, to say 'I had eaten', you take 'j'avais' and add the past participle of 'manger', which is 'mangé'. So, 'I had eaten' is 'J'avais mangé'.