For a native English speaker, understanding the difference between tenses in French can be challenging. Actually using them in a conversation, however, can be a lot harder.

Enter Pascal, your friendly neighborhood animated YouTube French tutor. In this video, Pascal deconstructs the past tense and the imperfect past tense in French, otherwise known as passé composé and imparfait. While the former is used for definitive events that occurred at a specific time in the past, the latter is used to describe action that occurred at a vague time with no concrete beginning or end.

So if you’re talking about things that you “used to do” when you “lived abroad,” knowing these distinctions could be absolutely crucial. In no time you’ll be saying, “Quand j’étais jeune, j’avais du mal à me conjuguer en français.”