I'll explain the concordance of tenses to you simply.

[jrineakter]

So what did you observe? Did you notice that the tense of the second verb changed depending on the tense of the first? This is called tense concordance and today we are going to see exactly what it is.

Hello and thank you for joining me for this new video. About a year ago, we offered you a video on indirect speech in French. You can watch it again after this video if you want to go further. The link is in the description and in the "i" for info. In that video, we briefly explained the concept of tense agreement. But today, we wanted to go a little further on the subject so that you really understand it as a whole.

Be careful, tense agreement is not a very easy concept. So don't stress, take your time and watch this video several times if necessary. We have also prepared a little quiz for you, you have the link in the description, and you can test yourself after watching this video to see if you understood everything.

So what is tense concordance?

The word "concordance" means correspondence between two things, making one thing evolve at the same time as another so that it remains identical, so that it remains close. When we oman whatsapp number data talk about concordance of tenses, we are talking about the correspondence between the tenses of the verbs of the main clause and the subordinate clause. So put like that, I imagine that it is not very clear, but we will see, we will simplify the subject together.

To begin, I'm going to have to remind you what a proposition is. In a sentence, there can be one or more actions. A proposition corresponds to an action.

For example, if we take the very simple sentence "I eat an apple", there is only one action, the act of eating the apple, so there is only one proposition here. It is a sentence with a proposition.

Another example: I eat an apple while I walk. Here, we see that there are two verbs, there are two actions in this sentence. There is the action of eating and there is the action of walking, so there are two propositions: two verbs, two actions, two propositions.

I was talking to you in the definition about the concordance of the tenses of the main clause and the subordinate clause. What is a subordinate clause? It is simply a clause, therefore an action, which cannot exist on its own, it depends on another action. It is an action which depends on another, it cannot occur on its own. The action on which it depends, the major action, is what we call the main clause, and the subordinate clause is this action which depends on the main one. In general, this subordinate clause is introduced by "that".

For example: I read the book he gave me. That he gave me is the subordinate clause, because it doesn't make sense on its own. We can't say "that he gave me". We must already have a main clause, in this case "I read the book". So "I read the book" is the main action, the main clause; "that he gave me" is the subordinate clause that depends on the main clause and cannot exist alone.