Le Passé Composé

Passé composé is the french past tense. In order to make a sentence into past tense, you have to conjugate the verb avoir (to have) or the verb être (to be) and then add the past participle, or the past tense version of the verb. There are certain times to use avoir, and certain times to use être. You would use être for verbs involving movement such as aller (to go) and avoir for most of the other verbs that do not involve going from one place to another. You will also need to be able to find the past participle, this is simple because most of the verbs follow a pattern but some do not. Most verbs ending in er will have a past participle ending in é and most verbs ending in ir will have a past participle ending in i but there will be some verbs that do not follow this pattern and you will just have to memorize the endings.  For example, if you want to say, I have eaten or I ate, you would write J'ai (conjugation of avoir) mangé (the past participle of manger).