The French passé récent (recent past) describes actions that have just happened and is formed by combining the present tense of venir (“to come”) with de followed by an infinitive, for example: Je viens de manger (I just ate).
Je viens de
I just
Venir de + infinitive – The Recent Past
The passé récent is the French equivalent of “just + verb” in English. To use this tense, you need to know how to conjugate venir (“to come”) in the present tense, and follow this construction:
venir in present tense + de + Infinitive
Example sentences
Now that we have the grammatical structure down, let’s go through a few example sentences.
Je viens de manger.
I just ate.
Il vient de commencer.
He just started.
In the sentence Il vient de commencer (“he just started”), the subject could be a person beginning an activity or it could describe the weather.
For example: Il vient de commencer à étudier le français (“He just started studying French”).
For the weather: Il vient de commencer à neiger (“It just started snowing”).
Nous venons d’acheter une nouvelle voiture.
We just bought a car.
Je viens de boire un café.
I just drank a coffee.
Note that the passé récent is not used in the negative form. For example, you cannot say Je ne viens pas de manger (“I didn’t just eat”). Instead, use the passé composé: Je n’ai pas mangé (“I didn’t eat”).
One last example…
Tu viens de finir cette leçon.
You just finished this lesson.
Related lessons
- Venir (Word of the day)
- Venir conjugation tables
- Subjunctive mood
- Passé simple tense
- Plus-que-parfait tense
- Imperative mood
- Imperfect tense
- Conditional tense
- Future tense
