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Welcome to this video about the imperfect ou imparfait in French. This video is going
to be about the formation of the imperfect and not about its use. But generally speaking
the imperfect is used for the past, but only in certain circumstances. there is going to
be another video about that. So the imperfect is one of the easiest tenses and it is formed
by using the root of the 1st person plural in the present and then adding the endings
of -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient. So -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient.
Now we are going to have a look at an example, which is avoir, which means to have. So the
first person plural in the present is avons and to find the root you take away the ending
which is the -ons. So the root for the imperfect is av-. So thus the conjugation is
J'avais Tu avais
Il/elle avait Nous avions
Vous aviez Ils/elles avaient
Now as I said before, it's a very easy tense. There's only one exception, which is exceptional
for the French language as there are always so many exceptions. The exception is être.
So now we are going to have a look at être. être means to be and the first person plural
in the present is sommes, which already is irregular by itself. You would think that
for the imparfait it would be je sommais, but it isn't. The root of the imparfait is:
ét- So the imparfait is conjugated this way and
you can repeat after me: j'étais
tu étais il/elle était
nous étions vous étiez
ils/elles étaient So to repeat
The imperfect is formed by using the root of the first person plural in the present,
except for être where it is ét- plus the endings: -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions,
-iez, -aient I hope this video helped you to learn the
imperfect and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the comments below
and yeah if you liked it, like the video and I hope to see you soon! Bye! À bientôt!