French Grammar

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Write a French Letter (new)

French Test (.pdf)

In English verbs don’t change that much when they’re conjugated, for example they usually add an “s” in the third person singular, the rest stays the same, I speak, you speak, he speaks, we speak, they speak, so as you have noticed the verb “to speak” stays almost unchanged, in French the verb can have up to 6 conjugations, each pronoun may use a unique form. But it’s not that complicated as it may seem, because most French verbs follow a pattern, once you’re familiar with that pattern you will be able to conjugate a big number of verbs the same way.

Just like in English a verb in French takes different forms in different tenses (present, future), voices, and moods. 

Before talking about the conjugation categories, consider that a verb is divided into two parts, the first part is the stem or root and the second part is the ending which usually changes from one tense to another and from one person to another.

French verbs are categorized into 5 categories or groups, the first three categories are verbs ending in (-er), (-ir), and (-re), which are considered regular verbs, meaning that verbs having these endings in their infinitive are usually conjugated the same way depending on the tense. The good news is that this kind of verbs makes 90 % of all verbs.

The 4^th group (ends in -er) and takes the same endings as regular verbs, but takes different stem when conjugated. Finally there is a 5^th category which is unpredictable concerning its root (stem) as well as its endings. Both categories need to be memorized by heart, especially the fifth category which is hard to predict since it doesn’t follow any pattern but easy to memorize.

Chose the tense you want to learn from the French verbs list: