Passé composé (French pronunciation: [pase kɔ̃pɔze], compound past) is the most commonly used past tense in the modern French language. It is used to express an action that has been completed at the time of speech, or at some (possibly unknown) time in the past. Passé composé originally corresponded in function to the English present perfect, and is still used as such (e.g. J'ai fini may mean "I have finished"), but it is now used more generally as a perfective past tense (expressing single completed events in the past, like the English "I finished"). It is commonly used as a "narration tense" for oral and written narration. Note that in formal writing, even for children, narration is usually done with the passé simple instead of the passé composé.