5.8 Les vêtements sont rangés dans le placard.

My question is about the sentence: "The clothes are put away in the cupboard." Which is translated as “Les vêtements sont rangés dans le placard.”

It looks to me like “sont rangés” is passé composé but in English I understand the sentence to be in the present tense. So why not say: “Les vêtements sont ranger dans le placard.”

When push comes to shove, I can convince myself why I would use passé composé, but then the question is why is ranger conjugated with être and not avoir?

Please help!

Hi Santjie,

Excellent question! In these sentences, we're using what's called the "past participle" of the verb ranger "to tidy / to put away": rangé "tidied / put away." But you don't really have to worry about what past participles are for right now (we'll get to that in Level 2!). All you need to know is that they can be used as adjectives - and that's exactly what's happening here: rangé is being used as an adjective to describe les vêtements "the clothes." This means that we can place it after être "to be" (i.e. les vêtements sont rangés "the clothes are tidied / put away") or we can place it next to the noun (i.e. les vêtements rangés "the tidied / put away clothes"), just like any other adjective.

All of this may sound rather complicated at first, but quite a few of the adjectives that you've already learned in French are actually past participles - for example, fatigué "tired" is the past participle of fatiguer "to tire," perdu "lost" is the past participle of perdre "to lose," intéressé "interested" is the past participle of intéresser "to interest," etc. They fact that they're actually past participles doesn't matter: you can just use them like any other kind of adjective!

I hope this helps!

Hi Jonathan

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. It's been a while since I've done my French lessons… oops. But your answer makes sense. It also answers another question that I had (the reason why I came to the forum today), so it's a win-win for me. Merci!!!!