Passé composé: avoir + 2nd-group -ir verbs (finir, choisir)

The second group of French verbs — the -ir/-iss- verbs like finir, choisir, réussir — forms its passé composé in the simplest way you could hope for. Take the infinitive, drop the -r, and you have the past participle. Finir gives fini, choisir gives choisi, réussir gives réussi. Combine that with avoir and you have the compound past: j'ai fini, tu as choisi, il a réussi.

This page walks through the mechanics, lists the verbs you'll meet most often, and flags one structural fact that surprises learners: the -i past participle isn't unique to the second group. Many third-group -ir verbs form their participle the same way (partir → parti, dormir → dormi), so once you've internalized the -i ending, you've covered a much larger slice of the language than just -iss- verbs.

The rule in one line

Replace the -ir of the infinitive with -i. Then put the result after the present-tense conjugation of avoir.

The final -i is always pronounced /i/ — clean, short, no surprises. There's no silent letter, no consonant change, no irregular stem. This is one of the most predictable corners of French morphology.

Full conjugation: finir in the passé composé

Notice that the past participle fini never changes form. That's because finir takes avoir as its auxiliary, and with avoir the participle stays in its base form unless a direct object precedes the verb. (For the agreement edge case, see agreement with avoir.)

High-frequency 2nd-group verbs to memorize

Almost all -ir/-iss- verbs describe a change of state ("to become more X"), often built on an adjective: grand → grandir, vieux → vieillir, rouge → rougir, gros → grossir. Once you see this pattern, the meanings predict themselves.

The bigger pattern: -i past participle across both -ir groups

Here is the structural fact that will save you a lot of work. Most French -ir verbs — second group and third group — form their past participle in -i. The second group is regular and predictable; the third group is "irregular," but a large subset of irregular -ir verbs follow exactly the same surface rule.

So the moment you hear an infinitive ending in -ir (or even some -re verbs like rire and suivre), your default guess for the past participle should be -i. You'll be right far more often than wrong. The exceptions are clustered: venir/tenir → venu/tenu, ouvrir/offrir/couvrir → ouvert/offert/couvert, mourir → mort, courir → couru. Those are listed on the irregular past participles page.

The two groups still differ in the present tense (the -iss- infix is what defines the second group: nous finissons, vous finissez, ils finissent), but in the passé composé the surface form converges. A learner who memorizes "regular -ir gets -i" will produce the right participle for partir (je suis parti) without ever noticing it's actually third-group.

Auxiliary choice: most -ir verbs use avoir

The second group is uniformly avoir-taking. Every verb in the table above forms its passé composé with avoir + past participle. J'ai fini, tu as choisi, ils ont grandi.

The exceptions live in the third group, where a handful of -ir verbs are on the maison d'être list (partir, sortir, venir, revenir, devenir) and so use être instead. Don't let those exceptions confuse the rule for the second group. If a verb conjugates with the -iss- infix in the present (nous finissons, nous choisissons, nous réussissons), it always takes avoir. Full stop.

Word-order details

The conjugated form of avoir and the past participle generally sit together, and short adverbs slide between them rather than after the participle. This is one of the few word-order rules that's stricter in French than in English.

In negation, ne… pas wraps around the auxiliary, not the participle: je n'ai pas fini, never je n'ai fini pas.

The verb réussir: a small preposition trap

Réussir takes the preposition à before an infinitive ("to manage to") and à before an exam (in some constructions), but is direct with a noun complement.

This isn't unique to the passé composé — it's a property of réussir in any tense — but learners often meet réussir for the first time in past contexts, so it's worth flagging here.

Comparison with English

English forms its simple past for these verbs with -ed (finished, chose, succeeded) and the perfect with have + -ed. French overlaps: j'ai fini covers both "I finished" and "I have finished." But there's no English equivalent of the -iss- infix, and a learner might reach for finissé by analogy with parlé — that doesn't exist. The form is fini, full stop.

The other point of friction is that English to fill out requires the particle out; French remplir doesn't. J'ai rempli le formulaire — no preposition.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• Drop -r from the infinitive, and you have the past participle: finir → fini, choisir → choisi.
• All second-group verbs take avoir as their auxiliary in the passé composé.
• The -i past participle pattern extends well into the third group (parti, sorti, dormi, ri), so this rule rewards over-application — your default guess for any -ir verb should be -i.
• Past participles in -i never end in -t or -é. Those endings belong to other patterns (present tense, first-group participles).
• Short adverbs go between the auxiliary and the participle (j'ai déjà fini), and ne… pas wraps the auxiliary alone (je n'ai pas fini).