How do you form the past compound tense?

The past compound tense is formed with two key components. The first component is the present tense conjugation of the verb avoir or être (these are called the auxiliary verbs) and the second is the past participle of your main verb. Firstly, you have to figure out what type of verb it is that you're dealing with here; whether it takes avoir or être as its auxiliary. Fortunately enough most verbs actually take avoir, but there are some rogue ones that you have to look out for that take être . But fear not, Dr and Mrs Vandertramp will help you out there. This nifty little abbreviation incorporates all of the verbs that take être instead of avoir, these are devenir, revenir, monter, rester, sortir, venir, aller, naître, descendre, entrer, rentrer, tomber, retourner, arriver, mourir and partir. The next step, is to form the past participle of the verb in question. For the most part, this is fairly simple. There are some irregular verbs that break the rule but I will explain how regular past participles are formed. Take the dictionary form (or infinitive form) of the verb and remove the ending, be it -er, -ir, or -re. For -er verbs, just stick on é, with -ir verbs, add on -it and for -re you round it off with a -u. For example, let's take the er verb jouer and let's say that we want to express this in the second person singular, which is ‘you’ or ‘tu’. Does jouer feature in the Dr Mrs Vandertramp abbreviation? No it doesn't. So that means that it takes avoir. The present tense conjugation of avoir for the second person is ‘as’, so this is gives us our first component. Secondly, we drop then -er ending of the verb, and add on the -é, leaving us with the past participle formation ‘joué’. If we put those two components together, we are left with the second person singular past compound conjugation of jouer: tu as joué. And there you have it!