Free Passé Composé Quiz

How the passé composé quiz works

You make two choices before you start: a mode, then what to practice. Nothing is preselected, and the Start button tells you what's still to pick. The three modes are:

• Avoir or être? One verb and a subject at a time, with two buttons.
• Write the passé composé. The same question, but you type the form.
• Agreement. A short everyday sentence with a gap where the past participle goes.

In the first two modes you choose verb sets, such as the être verbs or the irregular participles. In Agreement you choose kinds of agreement instead, such as agreement with être or with avoir. A running score stays on screen while you work, with your right answers, your wrong ones and the percent.

Avoir or être? One verb at a time

In this mode the quiz shows a subject and a verb with its meaning: elle · partir, to leave. Press avoir or être, or keys 1 and 2. The quiz then shows the whole form, elle est partie, and a one-line reason:

• “Partir is one of the DR MRS VANDERTRAMP verbs, which take être, so the participle agrees with the subject.”
• “Every verb used with se takes être.”
• “Faire takes avoir, like most French verbs. Its participle is irregular: fait.”

The verbs that switch come with and without a direct object, as sortir and sortir la poubelle. For the second, the reason says that sortir takes avoir when it has a direct object, here la poubelle.

Write the passé composé

This mode asks the same question, and you type the answer. For elle · aller you type est allée. You can type the subject too, so elle est allée also counts, and capitals don't matter. With je, tu, nous and vous the person could be a man or a woman, so both agreements count: suis allé or suis allée.

The feedback tells you what went wrong. If only the accents are off, it says “Almost: check the accents.” If the auxiliary is right but the ending is wrong, or the participle is right but the auxiliary isn't, it says which. You don't need a French keyboard: é, è, ê, à, ç, î, ô, û and the other special letters are on buttons under the box.

Past participle agreement practice

The Agreement mode gives you a short everyday sentence with the participle missing: Elles sont ___ à huit heures. (partir). The buttons show the participle's forms, parti, partie, partis and parties, and keys 1 to 4 pick them. A participle that already ends in -s has only three forms, such as pris, prise and prises. After the answer you see the full sentence and the reason, which comes down to one of three rules:

• With être, the participle agrees with the subject: elles sont parties.
• With a reflexive verb, it agrees with the subject unless se is an indirect object or a direct object follows: elles se sont lavées, but elles se sont lavé les mains.
• With avoir, it agrees only with a direct object that comes before the verb: la lettre que j'ai écrite, je les ai vues. Otherwise it doesn't agree: elles ont écrit une longue lettre.

You pick one or more of four kinds: With être, Reflexive verbs, With avoir and Verbs that switch. The last one puts the two auxiliaries side by side: elle est sortie, but elle a sorti la poubelle.

The sentences come from 257 hand-written sentence frames. Each frame is combined with the subjects that suit it, from il and elle to ma sœur, Paul et Marie and les filles, which gives 3,234 different sentences. Every frame was reviewed for natural French.

Five verb sets, one verb at a time

In the first two modes you pick one or more verb sets:

• Être verbs: 17 verbs, the 16 of DR MRS VANDERTRAMP plus passer.
• Common avoir verbs: 44 verbs with regular participles, such as parlé, fini and vendu.
• Irregular participles: 30 avoir verbs, such as été, eu, fait, pris, mis, vu, dit, écrit, ouvert and reçu.
• Reflexive verbs: 29 verbs, including six where se is an indirect object, so the participle never agrees: se parler, se téléphoner, se sourire, s'écrire, se plaire and se demander.
• Verbs that switch: sortir, monter, descendre, passer, rentrer and retourner, each with and without a direct object.

Each verb you picked comes up once before any verb comes up again, with a fresh subject each time. A quiz on the être verbs covers all 17 before it repeats one, and the sentence frames in Agreement take turns the same way. Every form comes from the same conjugation engine as our French verb conjugation tables and French verb conjugation worksheets: 600 verbs from Wiktionary, checked against two other sources.

Practice the questions you missed

Press Stop and see my score at any point. You get your score and every question you missed, each with the right answer and what you gave. Practice my mistakes then runs only those questions again, so the verbs you keep missing get the extra turns. The quiz is free, with no signup and no account.

A quiz on screen, worksheets on paper

The quiz is for practice on screen, one question at a time. For a class, the passé composé worksheets print the same verb sets and kinds of agreement in five exercises, with an answer key that starts on a new page. To see why each verb takes the auxiliary it does, read passé composé with être, which covers DR MRS VANDERTRAMP, the house of être and each kind of agreement the quiz tests. And if a verb's other tenses are the trouble, the French verb conjugation tables give every form of all 600.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

Conjugation tables come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). Verbs are ranked by Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list, built from OpenSubtitles 2018 (CC BY-SA 4.0).