French carves the past into completed versus ongoing where English uses one form for both. Read a situation, pick the tense, and on a miss you find out exactly which English habit pulled you wrong. The wrong answer is the lesson.
“I was reading when she called.”
I read = j'ai lu or je lisais ?
English uses one past for two French ones. You translate word for word and can't feel which is meant.
j'ai lu quand elle a appelé
You wanted "was reading" and grabbed a finished tense. The backdrop needed imparfait.
je viens de partir
The "just happened" maps to no English tense you know, so you default to the wrong one.
passé composé vs imparfait
Completed event or ongoing state? The choice changes the meaning, not only the form.
Passé composé or imparfait isn't a coin toss, it tracks whether an action was a completed event or an ongoing backdrop. English smears both into one simple past, so your instinct keeps reaching for the wrong one. The trainer makes that instinct visible and corrects it.
Each prompt is a real moment with context, so you choose the tense the way you would mid-sentence, not by filling a gap.
The core split, drilled directly: a finished event takes passé composé, a running backdrop takes imparfait.
On a miss it tells you which English habit misled you, the false perfect, the wrong backdrop, the just-happened.
The three futures are in the mix too, so tense choice stays a whole-system skill, not one rule.
Wrong answers aren't penalised, they're explained. Each one shows you the exact reasoning that should have fired.
Once you know which tense, jump to Conjugation Drill on the same verb to practise spelling it.
Early-intermediate to upper-intermediate
Built for the stage where you can form the tenses but keep choosing the wrong one because English nudges you. If passé composé versus imparfait still feels like guesswork, this is for you. Higher up, it sharpens the edge cases.
A short, contextual prompt sets up an action in time. No fill-in-the-blank cues to give it away.
Choose the form that matches what actually happened: an event, a backdrop, a result, a plan.
On a wrong answer, see which English habit pulled you and the reasoning that should have won.
Phone or laptop. Nothing to install, no account to make.
This trains which tense to choose, not how to spell it. For the forms, see Conjugation Drill.
Each prompt is a short situation in French, so basic comprehension keeps you moving.
Passé composé is for completed, bounded events ('I read the book'); imparfait is for ongoing states, habits and backdrops ('I was reading', 'I used to read'). English uses one simple past for both, which is exactly the confusion this tool targets.
Yes. Alongside the passé composé and imparfait split, it works in futures and conditionals so choosing a tense stays a whole-system skill rather than a single rule.
Because the wrong answer reveals the English habit steering you. Instead of just marking a miss, it names the trap, the false perfect, the wrong backdrop, the just-happened, so the same mistake stops repeating.
Tense Sense trains which tense to reach for. Conjugation Drill trains writing that tense correctly, accents and all. They're meant to be used together.
Free, no account. Everything runs in your browser, so your progress stays on your device.