There are also two irregular past participles that take être as their auxiliary:
- Mourir (to die) – Mort (e)(s)
- Naître (to be born) – Né (e)(s)
These 2 verbs need to agree in gender and number. For instance:
- Il est né
- Elle est née
- Nous sommes nés
- Elles sont nées
Exercises
Comment: We’ll add an e. Why? We are using the auxiliary être and we are referring to a female.
Normally, we don’t need to make these adjustments for avoir.
However, if the conjugation of avoir is placed to the right of the noun, we might need to adjust the participle. For instance:
- La voiture que j’ai vue: The car that I saw.
This is important to know as you will see it in many texts. However, if you’re a beginner, you should rather focus on learning the past participles related to avoir, and not when they need to agree in gender and number.
For a beginner, the agreement is only important for être.
I just wanted to mention that you need to adjust avoir also, but later in your studies 🙂
Comment: In certain contexts, it’s possible to use 2 E‘s in this example.
For instance:
- Ashley et moi n’avons pas essayé. Nous sommes allées au parc: Ashley and me did not try. We went to the park.
In this case, we’ll assume that “me” is female.
However, we dont have enough information in the exercise above to indicate that we should use 2 E’s.
Is it difficult to learn the different past participles?
I would say no. You’ll see them all the time if you immerse yourself in French.
However, they are quite difficult to learn for a beginner. Some of them are highly irregular and the French teachers often try to trick you on your tests.
My suggestion is to learn the most common past participles. And like I said before, don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time.
At a certain point in time (when you’ve read enough French texts 🙂 ), you’ll know them by heart.
