One of the weird things about studying French is that we seem to have three levels:

Beginners use present tense, imperatives, infinitives, and future proche; Intermediate learners use passé composé, imparfait, future and conditional tensesAdvanced learners use passé simple and subjonctif

Yet, if we look at picture books written for French children, many use passé simple straight off.

I remember when I started reading (in English) in Grade 1 of primary school, one thing I had to get used to was constructs like “said Dora”. It doesn’t happen in spoken English, so felt a little weird. But it wasn’t overly difficult. Perhaps people from English-speaking backgrounds who had stories read to them would have been familiar with that already before reading it. The same thing must be true for French children reading or hearing passé simple. It’s a little different but not hard.

I recently read three French picture books. The first (Le Grand Antonio by Élise Gravel) was a fairly easy one with few words, written in present tense. The second (Quel est mon superpouvoir? by Aviaq Johnston) was a translation from English, written in passé simple (and imparfait). It was a comfortable read for me. The third (Dounia by Marya Zarif) was (mostly) written in present tense but was more difficult due to its vocabulary and more descriptive text. It is obvious to me that it is possible for texts in passé simple to be easier than those in the easiest tenses.

The thing is, you don’t need to know how to conjugate passé simple to read it. You just need to recognise the endings of third person singular (3ps) and plural (3pp) for regular verbs plus know a few of the irregular verbs. Here they are.

For -er verbs, 3ps ends in -a and 3pp ends in -èrent.

For -ir and -re verbs, 3ps ends in -it and 3pp in -irent.

You may come across a few -oir verbs, which have -ut and -urent.

The main irregular verbs to watch out for are:

être: fut, furent

faire: fit, firent

avoir: eut, eurent

The regular ones should not pose any problems. The avoir ones are recognisable thanks to already knowing the past participle of avoir (eu). The main difficulty is not mixing up the être and faire words. A simple rule is that faire has an ‘i’ in it, and so does its passé simple conjugation.

I hope that helps. It helps me.