Home      Alphabet      Adjectives      Verbs      Nouns      French 101 Phrases      Vocabulary      Expressions      More…

 

French Conditional Tense

Salim 2006 © speak7.com

I Like this Page

Tell a Friend about this Page

Save as Homepage

 

You will learn in this lesson: French Conditional, present conditional tense, conditional stem changes.

 

Present Conditional Tense

 

One of the easiest tense in French is what we will learn now. The present conditional tense describes an action which is possible but not a fact: j’apprendrais l’anglais si j’avais du temps (I would learn English if I had time). The present conditional is considered the easiest tense to form, because it uses the same conjugation for all groups with only few special cases. To form the conditional for groups of verbs ending in (-er) and (-ir) add the appropriate ending  which are: je -ais, tu -ais, il -ait, nous -ions, vous -iez, ils -aient to the infinitive. And for verbs ending in (-re) just drop the final “e” of the infinitive and add the same ending you added before, which are again: je -ais, tu -ais, il -ait, nous -ions, vous -iez, ils -aient.

 

French Conditional
Present Conditional “Parler” (to speak)
Singular	Plural
je parlerais (I would speak) tu parlerais (you would speak) il, elle parlerait (he, she would speak)	nous parlerions (we would speak) vous parleriez (you would speak) ils, elles parleraient (they would speak)

 

 

French Conditional
Present Conditional “Partir” (to leave, or to go)
Singular	Plural
je partirais (I would go) tu partirais (you would go) il, elle partirait (he, she would go)	nous partirions (we would go) vous partiriez (you would go) ils, elles partiraient (they would go)

 

French Conditional
Present Conditional “Prendre” (to take)
Singular	Plural
je prendrais (I would take) tu prendrais (I would take) il, elle prendrait (I would take)	nous prendrions (I would take) vous prendriez (I would take) ils, elles prendraient (I would take)

 

Note that the last “e” of prendre is dropped, that happens only with verbs ending in “re” in their infinitive.

 

These are the exceptional cases that you need to have a look at, they’re not really special cases but you need to make a slight modification to the stem and not to the ending, just like you do to the future tense. The table below shows some verbs that have their stem changed in the present conditional:

 

Verb (stem-) english	Verb (stem-) english	Verb (stem-) english
aller (ir-) to go avoir (aur-) to have devoir (devr-) have to être (ser-) to be	faire (fer-) to do   pouvoir (pourr-) be able to savoir (saur-)  to know venir (viendr-) to come	voir (verr-) to see vouloir (voudr-) to want

 

For example the verb to go “aller” has a changed stem which is: (ir-) so, if we conjugate it into the present conditional we would have:

 

Present Conditional “Aller” (to go)
Singular	Plural
J’ irais (I would go) tu irais (you would go) il, elle irait (he, she would go)	nous irions (we would go) vous iriez (you would go) ils, elles iraient (they would go)

 

I think this lesson of the French conditional is pretty easy and can be mastered in no time.

 

Salim 2006 © speak7.com   speak7@gmail.com

All Rights Reserved