Bonjour et bienvenue à Coffee Break French, welcome back to Coffee Break French.

In Lesson 62 we're introducing a new tense, until now we've been looking at the present

and the perfect tense, but now it's time to introduce the imperfect tense. The imperfect

tense is used in particular situations when talking in the past, and by the time you've

listened to this lesson, you'll understand when to use the imperfect. I hope that you

find this lesson useful.

Now we've already learned the perfect tense, we've learnt it with avar verbs, we've learnt

it with etra verbs, we've learnt it with the reflex of verbs, and we now even know how

to put e and o into sentences in the perfect tense. However, the perfect tense is only

used in certain situations in the past, for example, telling a story. So for example,

he arrived at the house, he arrived at the house, he went inside, he talked to someone

with a French name, yes, it's a girl's name in French, I used to have a friend called

Sidoni when I left in France, wonderful, she's doing now anyway, so we're telling a story

here, the narrative, so we use the perfect tense. Now the imperfect tense is what fills

in all the other details, because the imperfect tense is used to describe things in the past.

There are actually a number of ways that we use the imperfect tense, and we're going

to concentrate on one of them today. I want you to imagine the situation, let's go back

to our story, so he arrived at the house, he went inside, he spoke to Sidoni, but as he

was speaking to Sidoni, the vampire appeared at the top of the stairs. I don't know what

I'm not going to ask you to translate that Anna, while he was speaking to Sidoni, that

was what was happening when something else happened. Okay, so if we think of while he was

speaking as the ongoing thing, then the vampire appearing is the thing that interrupts that

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