Passé composé or imparfait? The one question

Every grammar book gives you the same five rules for choosing between passé composé and imparfait: completed action, repeated action, description, simultaneous action, interruption. I learned those rules. I still got it wrong constantly.

What finally worked was reducing the five rules to one question. Here it is, with the examples that made it click.

The one question

Before every past-tense verb, ask:

Am I describing a discrete event with a beginning and an end, or a state, background, or ongoing situation?

Discrete event → *passé composé. State / background / ongoing → imparfait*.

That's 90% of cases. The other 10% are the interesting edge cases, which I'll cover at the end.

Examples in pairs

The same verb takes either tense depending on context. This is the part that breaks most learners.

*Manger: - Hier soir, j'ai mangé une pizza. — Last night I ate a pizza. (Discrete event. Started, finished.) - Quand j'étais petit, je mangeais une pizza tous les vendredis.* — When I was little, I used to eat a pizza every Friday. (Ongoing / habitual.)

*Vivre: - J'ai vécu trois ans à Paris. — I lived in Paris for three years. (Bounded duration, completed.) - Je vivais à Paris quand j'ai rencontré ma femme.* — I was living in Paris when I met my wife. (Background state, plus a discrete event in the middle.)

*Pleuvoir: - Il a plu pendant deux heures. — It rained for two hours. (Bounded, completed.) - Il pleuvait quand je suis sorti.* — It was raining when I went out. (Ongoing background.)

*Être: - J'ai été content de te voir. — I was glad to see you. (Often: a specific moment of reaction.) - J'étais content à cette époque.* — I was happy at that time. (State, ongoing.)

The first time I read examples like these I thought the choice was arbitrary. It is not. The speaker's intent — am I framing this as one moment or as a backdrop — is real and detectable.

Signal words

Some words almost always pull one tense or the other:

- *Passé composé pullers: soudain, tout à coup, d'un coup, un jour, à ce moment-là, hier, la semaine dernière, pendant X années with a bounded number. - Imparfait pullers: toujours, souvent, d'habitude, tous les + day, pendant que (when describing two ongoing actions), chaque, parfois*.

These aren't laws. They're tilts. Pendant que je travaillais, le téléphone a sonné — pendant que takes imparfait (ongoing), but the second clause is passé composé (discrete event). Both happen in one sentence because they're doing different jobs.

The interrupted action pattern

This is the single most common B1 grammar pattern in spoken French:

Je [imparfait] quand [passé composé].

Je dormais quand le tremblement de terre a commencé. — I was sleeping when the earthquake started.

Elle marchait dans la rue quand elle a vu son ex. — She was walking down the street when she saw her ex.

The imperfect sets the stage; the passé composé delivers the event. Learn this shape and half your past-tense sentences write themselves.

The trickier cases

*Habitual past. Quand j'étais petit, j'allais à la mer chaque été.* — Imperfect for habits. English uses "would" or "used to" here. If you can translate it as "used to", it's imparfait.

*State changes. J'ai eu peur (I got scared — moment of reaction) versus J'avais peur (I was scared — ongoing state). The same verb shifts meaning depending on tense. Savoir does the same: J'ai su qu'il mentait = "I found out he was lying"; Je savais qu'il mentait* = "I knew he was lying."

*Description versus event in narration. Il faisait beau. Les enfants jouaient. Soudain, un chien a aboyé.* — Three imparfaits set the scene; one passé composé moves the action. Whole short stories are built on this rhythm.

How to drill this

Three exercises that worked for me, in order of efficiency:

1. *Pair-tense rewriting. Take any imparfait sentence and rewrite it as passé composé. Je travaillais dans une banque. → J'ai travaillé dans une banque pendant cinq ans. The act of forcing the rewrite teaches you what each tense is for. 2. Story retelling. Pick a 200-word story in English, retell it aloud in French past tenses. Record yourself. Listen back. Every wrong choice will be obvious in playback in a way it never is in your head. 3. Targeted Anki cards.* Front: an English sentence in the past. Back: the correct French version with the tense flagged. Avoid grammar drills where you fill in a blank — those train pattern matching, not the decision.

For more drilling material the A2 study guide walks through the passé composé refresher, and the B1 study guide covers the imperfect introduction and the interrupted-action pattern in more depth. The glossary has short definitions of both tenses if you want a single-line reference.

The reflex you're training

The end state is not "I can apply the rules quickly." The end state is "I don't think about it." A French speaker picks the tense the same way English speakers pick "I ate" versus "I was eating" — entirely by feel, in service of what they mean.

You get to that reflex through volume. Pasting your own writing into the level checker is a useful sanity check — if your sentences come back at a weird level because of tense choices, you'll see it.

Past tenses are the hardest grammar in French, and the most worth nailing. Get them right and your output sounds like a B1 speaker instead of a beginner.