difference between etre and avoir verb

I am mostly confused in these two verbes..it makes me feel its the same thing! i am confused when to use verb etre and when to use verb avoir.please help me by giving a reasonable explanation.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on November 17, 2010 at 6:24pm

Essentially, there is a small group of verbs (but many of them are common) which take être. These are basically a few common movement verbs (like aller - to go) and verbs to do with "change of state" (such as mourir - to die). So-called "reflexive" or "pronominal" verbs (verbs that have a pronoun inserted that represents the same thing/person as the subject) also use être in standard French. All other verbs use avoid.

So for example:

Elle a voyagé - she has travelled
Elle est revenue - she has come back

There's no particular difference in meaning really between avoir and être in this case-- it just turns out that revenir is one of the few "special" verbs that people use être with, but voyager isn't.

What the être verbs have in common is that they're intransitive verbs, and generally allow a special construction like this:

La femme, revenue hier des Pays-Bas...
The woman, who came back yesterday from the Netherlands, ...
La femme, morte hier, ...
The woman, who died yesterday, ...

Notice how in French with these special verbs, you don't need any phrase to translate "who..." (if you like, qui est... has been "missed out" in these sentences). Other verbs don't have this property, e.g. people wouldn't generally say:

La femme, voyagé hier...

but would say:

La femme, qui a voyagé hier...

Linguists sometimes refer to these special verbs like revenir as "unaccusative" verbs.