Once you get to that point, you’re thinking like a French person. What you need to do is keep speaking, listening, and reading in French until ‘elle est tombée’ sounds right and natural to you, and ‘elle a tombé’ sounds weird and wrong.
Really though, unless you’re going to carry a piece of paper around with you and refer to it whenever you need to say something in the passé composé, these lists are only useful to get you started.
#QUITTER CONJUGATION PASSE COMPOSE PLUS#
Montermeans to rise or ascend, and also has two opposites: fall (tomber)or descend (descendre), plus a prefixed version of all three: remonter, redescendre, retomber. Plus, there’s the prefix version, repartir (to set out again, not to be confused with répartir, to share out).Īller, plus its opposite, venir, and the two prefixes, devenir and revenir. The three verbs arriver, retournerand rester are all opposites of partir. What’s the opposite of depart/leave/go? Obviously, it’s arrive/return/stay. Sortir, plus its opposite, entrer, and their prefixed versions, ressortir and rentrer. Naître, plus its opposite, mourir, and with a prefix, renaître. The verbs are Naître, Sortir, Partir, Aller and Monter. In fact, with a bit of fiddling about, we can reduce the Mrs Vandertramp verbs to a simple list of five, plus the related verbs to each of them. The special verbs naturally form into groups, either by being opposites in meaning or by adding prefixes, and the mnemonics split up these groups and shuffle everything around randomly. The problem with all of these mnemonics is that in some ways they actually make things more difficult than they really are. Vaderpants, who has descendre and devenir in his name, but none of the superfluous ‘re-‘ derivatives. It means you don’t have to include any of the endless ‘re-‘ prefixes, but also means you still have to be careful not to forget about devenir and redevenir ( to become again or turn back into), which are included in the V for venir. Alternatively, if you want to strip out all the ‘re-‘ prefixes and leave in all the rest, you could acquaint yourself with Mr D.
There is another version of the Mrs Vandertramp mnemonic which I learned at school: the less memorably named Mrs Daventramp, who just includes a letter for each of the thirteen basic verbs, missing out any which are the same with an added prefix.
…which, funnily enough, is also the official motto of the International Association for Video Piracy. No, if you want a mnemonic that covers all the subject-agreeing être-conjugating verbs, you’re going to have to memorize this one: But in that case, why does the mnemonic include both entrer and rentrer? And if it includes rentrer, why not revenir, remonter, redescendre, redevenir, retomber, repartir, ressortir(note the extra ‘s’ in that one), and renaître? Adding in Mrs Vandertramp’s husband to make ‘Dr & Mrs’ (as in the image at the top of the post) is hardly going to solve that problem. Why is there only one ‘D’ in the name, when both descendre and devenir are on the special-verb list? Presumably it’s because devenir is just venir (which is in the name), plus a prefix. Except… something about her has always bothered me. Good old Mrs Vandertramp, the helpful mnemonic-lady made up of the initial letters of all the special verbs. They are the Mrs Vandertrampverbs, and they are these: So rather than ‘ils ont donné’ or ‘elle a fait’, you get ‘ils sont partis’or ‘elle est tombée’. Learning French, you soon get to know about the small list of verbs that don’t behave like the others when you put them in the passé composé. They conjugate with être instead of avoir, and their past participle agrees with the subject of the verb.
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