Sometimes you know a word has two forms, but you 're not sure which one is appropriate to use in the situation at hand. This happens a lot with verbs, where past-tense forms can compete for acceptance ...

The perfect tense is used to say what you did or what you have done in the past. To form the perfect tense you need a subject, an auxiliary verb and a past participle. Perfect tense with 'être' in ...

Modal verbs, which express a likelihood, ability, permission, request, order etc., usually help main verbs to state the future. It is the reason they are categorised as auxiliary verbs in the context.

This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I’ll return with fresh material. For decades, ...