How do I form the perfect tense of verbs with 'avoir' as the auxiliary verb?

The French perfect tense can seem daunting at first but in fact there are simply three steps which you must follow. After a bit of practice, it will become second nature! The perfect tense always has 3 parts to it - the subject, the auxiliary verb and the past participle. The subject just means who is talking - this will usually either be je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils or elles or it may be a person's name. For verbs with 'avoir' as the auxiliary, we must next include the correctly conjugated part of 'avoir'. Avoir goes as follows: J'ai, tu as, il a, elle a, nous avons, vous avez, ils ont, elles ont. We choose the part applicable to the subject, so if our subject was 'elle', we now put 'a' as the second part of our construction or if the subject was 'ils' we would put 'ont' as the next part. Finally, we write in the past participle. For regular -er verbs, this is the infinitive with the -er ending taken off and an -é stuck on the end. For example, manger becomes mang when we remove the -er ending and finally mangé when we add on the -é. Similarly, payer becomes payé as the past participle following these same steps. For regular -ir verbs, we remove the -ir ending and add an -i. For example, finir becomes fini. For regular -re verbs, we remove the -re ending and add a -u. For example, rendre becomes rendu. Some past participles are irregular and must be learnt by heart but there are patterns that you will pick up and you will quickly become familiar with the most frequently used irregular past participles. So to recap, the 3 parts of the perfect tense: 1) Subject (je, me, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils, elles or somebody's name) 2) Part of avoir which corresponds to the subject 3) Past participle