The French Imperfect Tense: a Brief Guide

The French imperfect tense is used to talk about the past. There are two kinds of past event: those which have
finished, and those which continue until the present. In French, those events which continue until the present
are always discussed using the perfect tense (except in phrases using depuis, meaning ‘since’ or ‘for’, which
always use the present tense). For this reason, the English compound past (‘I have done’, ‘I have been’) is
almost always translated by the French perfect tense.
We may discuss events which have finished using either the perfect tense or the imperfect tense, depending
on whether we conceive of the event more as a continuous or regularly occurring action with duration
(imperfect) or more as an instantaneous or singular happening whose duration is negligible or of little interest
(perfect). For this reason, the English continuous past (‘I was doing’, ‘I was being’) and the English
construction ‘used to [do something]’ are usually translated by the imperfect, as, often enough, are verbs within
adverbials of time set off by ‘while’, ‘as’, etc.
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Verbs requiring the imperfect and perfect tenses in French – examples:
‘I saw a bird while I was walking.’ ‘I would pass time birdwatching as a child.’
‘As I talked, he seemed to drift off.’ ‘The vase was once blue but faded years ago.’
‘Suddenly there was a flash of lightning.’ ‘I used to like milk, but I developed an intolerance years ago.’
‘There were constant flashes of lightning.’ ‘On one occasion, there was a bird with golden wings.’
‘When he arrived, I hid the vase’. ‘To this day I never saw another bird so beautiful.’
‘When the door opened, I felt nervous.’ ‘When the door opened, I felt a chill.’
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Forming the imperfect tense is very simple. We take the present-tense nous form of a verb, and remove the
ending ‘-ons’. We are left with the imperfect stem, to which we must add the following endings:

1 -ais
2 -ais
3 -ait
1 -ions
2 -iez
3 -aient

There is a single exception to this rule. The verb être, to be, takes the imperfect stem ét-.

Let’s use as an example the verb jouer, to play:

Present-tense nous form: jouons

Imperfect stem: jou-
Imperfect tense:
1 jouais
2 jouais
3 jouait
1 jouions
2 jouiez
3 jouaient