Être ou pas être?

I just don’t get it. 

I have been trying (in a fairly half assed way, I grant you) to learn French for decades. On a good day I can managed to speak it like a four-year-old. On a very good day (which I haven’t had since I left London and stopped going to Paris at least once a year) I can speak it like a seven-year-old. 

Just to keep my hand in (without making much progress towards the goal), I do at least ten minutes every day with Duolingo. 

At the moment the lessons are on one of the things that just does my head in: the past tense with être. I’m okay with avoir. I mean, okay, fine, we use “have” to refer to the past. “I have read”, “he has eaten”, “they had talked”, etc. Why couldn’t the French just stick with that? But, oh, no, for certain verbs they want “to be”. So “je suis né” doesn’t mean “I am born”, but “I was born”. Again, okay, we use “was” too. And was is the past tense of is. Okay. 

It’s the general rule that does for me. Use être when the verb refers to a change of state or of motion. Again, okay. I guess. Il est tombé, il est monté, fine. So, why the fuck is it il a couru and il a dansé? How the fuck does he run or dance without motion? How? How? How?

None of which should suggest that I don’t feel for anyone trying to learn English, because it is a bastard. Tough, though, through? How is it possible for those four letters to be pronounced completely differently? C’est ridicule.

Nevertheless, que diable? Seriously, what the hell?