French Grammar

Alphabet

Numbers

Articles

Adjectives

Adverbs

Verbs

Present Tense

Past Tense

Future Tense

Imperfect

Imperative

Nouns

Pronouns

Conjunction

Negation

Subjunctive

Conditional

Comparative

Prepositions

Vocabulary & Writing

French Vocabulary

Food Terms

Basic Phrases

French Expressions

Write a French Letter (new)

French Test (.pdf)

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.

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:

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:

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