French Conjugation: A Comprehensive Guide

Understanding French verb conjugation is essential for anyone learning to speak French. Verbs are the most essential parts of any phrase or sentence, as they describe what’s happening in the sentence. Therefore, being able to use verbs in a correct and natural way is part and parcel of learning how to communicate in any language.

In order to use verbs correctly to communicate clearly, we have to conjugate them, which means to change their form so that they a) match the subject of the sentence (I, you, he, she, and so on), b) express the correct tense (present, future, or past), and c) express the correct function (or 'mood'), like to state a fact or give a command.

Every language has a different set of tenses and moods. French has no less than seven moods, and the most common of these, the indicative mood (used to state facts), has eight tenses.

But don’t worry! A lot of functions are covered by the main tenses in the indicative mood, which are the present tense (présent), the future tense (futur simple), and the two principal tenses in the past - the passé composé and the imparfait.

Learning how to conjugate French verbs in these four tenses will greatly expand your language repertoire and boost your communication skills, and it will be an excellent basis to move on to more complex tenses and moods. For this reason, they will be the focus of this article.

Present, past and future

Let’s start with a quick overview of these essential tenses. The présent corresponds to the present tense in English – for example, “I do,” “you go,” “she takes,” and so on. We use it to talk about the here and now – similar to English present continuous (“I am doing”) – or to talk about things that do not have a specific time frame, but are true now and at any time. Like all the tenses we are covering in this article, the present tense belongs to the indicative mood, i.e. the mode of certainty, which we use to state facts. Here are a few examples:

• Anna travaille dans un magasin. (Anna works in a shop.)
• Je cuisine. (I am cooking.)
• Paris est la capitale de la France. (Paris is the capital of France.)

The futur simple corresponds to English future simple, e.g. I will go, you will say, she will play, etc. and is the most common way of talking about the future in French. A couple of examples:

• Le mois prochain, je commencerai un nouvel emploi. (Next month I will start a new job.)
• Jean arrivera bientôt. (Jean will arrive soon.)

Things are a bit more complicated for the imparfait and the passé composé, as they don't map neatly onto English tenses. They are used in combination to talk about the past - the imparfait with an imperfect function, as the name says, i.e. for descriptions, past habits, and repeated actions, and the passé composé with a perfect function, i.e. for one-off events or actions that are clearly defined in time. Look at the examples, where the imparfait is underlined and the passé composé in bold:

• Quand j’ étais enfant, je passais mes vacances en Italie avec ma famille. Mais une fois, nous sommes allés en Espagne. (When I was a child, I used to spend my holidays in Italy with my family. But once we went to Spain.)
• Ce matin, alors que j’ étais sous la douche, quelqu’un a sonné. (This morning while I was in the shower someone rang the bell.)

For a detailed explanation of the differences between these two tenses and their use in combination, check our practical guide to the passé composé and the guide to mastering French past verbs.

French verb conjugation: How does it work?

The process for conjugating a verb is fairly simple. It consists of identifying the stem of the verb in question and adding the correct ending that corresponds to the mood, tense, and person you need for your sentence.

How do you find the stem? By taking the infinitive of the verb, i.e. the base form, and removing the infinitive ending (e.g. -er, -ir, and -re, for regular verbs).

In the next section you'll find a practical example of this process, and further on in this section, a step-by-step guide of how to do this for different types of verbs.

Stem + ending

Here’s a practical example of conjugation. I want to say 'I love pop music' in French. The verb I need is aimer, which translates 'to love.' (Check out our article on how to express your love in French) In order to obtain the stem of this verb, I need to remove the ending -er.

Now I have the stem of the verb, aim-. The subject of the sentence is ‘I’ – in French this is je. Since I’m stating a fact in present tense, I add the first person ending -e to the stem to get j’aime, which is the conjugated verb I am looking for.

A similar process happens in English, although as far as matching the verb with the subject is concerned, there are less endings, since many persons have the same:

• I love
  
• You love
  
• He/she loves
  
• We love
  
• You (plur.) love
  
• They love

As you can see, in the English present tense the only person that takes a different ending is 'he/she.'

Grammatical person

But what is a ‘person’? It is a grammatical category that refers to the subject of a sentence. There are six possible persons in French (three singular and three plural), like in English. But in French, each one normally takes a different verb form. See the table below for examples of the six different persons in sentences.

Like in English, in French every verb needs a subject, and cannot stand on its own. This means that every sentence needs to include one of the subject pronouns that correspond to each person (these are the words you find in the columns EN and FR above). You can see this in the examples provided in the table above. In the third person, the subject of the sentence could also be explicit, i.e. the person or thing that performs the action or that the sentence is about, as in the following examples:

• Anne travaille dans une école. ( Anne works in a school.)
• Ton frère a l’air sympa.( Your brother looks nice.)
• Le ciel est gris aujourd'hui. (The sky is gray today.)
• Mes amis veulent sortir. (My friends want to go out.)

When you are talking about someone else, whether the subject of the sentence is il, elle, or the name of a person or thing, you’ll need to use a third person singular verb. Or if talking about more than one person, you’ll use a third person plural verb (corresponding to 'they' in the table).

Now that you know how the conjugating process works, what you need is the sets of endings to select from when forming sentences, like we’ve done in the example at the beginning of the section. You'll find these in the next section. But first, let’s look at the crucial difference between regular and irregular verbs.

Regular vs. irregular verbs

The so-called “regular” French verbs are grouped into three categories: -er verbs (like aimer), -ir verbs (like finir), and -re verbs (like attendre). Regular verbs are classified according to how their infinitive ends, Regular verbs are classified according to how the base form of the verb (the infinitive) ends, so the key is to always keep in mind the base form of the verb.

The good news is that all the verbs in the same category will conjugate in the same way, so they all have the same endings in all the tenses. So once you’ve learned it for one, you’ve learned it for all – yay!

However, not all verbs fall into these categories. Those that don’t, the so-called 'irregular' verbs, have unique forms that only work for that specific verb or for a smaller set of verbs (although there are some patterns and similarities for irregular verbs).

Please note that we will not deal with reflexive verbs in this article. All the rules laid out here are also valid for reflexive verbs when you add the correct reflexive pronouns, as they follow the conjugation rules of every other verb. Now, let’s look at the three groups of regular verbs!

-er verbs conjugation

Regular verbs belonging to the first group end in -er. This is by far the largest category of regular verbs and includes very frequently used verbs such as aimer (to love), parler (to speak), manger (to eat), arriver (to arrive), travailler (to work), étudier (to study), voyager (to travel), acheter (to buy), and entrer (to enter).

As we mentioned, in order to conjugate these verbs, you’ll need to determine the stem first. The stem of -er verbs is obtained by removing the two letters -er from the infinitive. Thus, the stems of the verbs listed above would be aim-, parl-, mang-, arriv-, travaill-, étudi-, voyag-, achet-, and entr-.

Once you have the stem, you need to add the endings that correspond to the person and tense you need in your sentence (we won’t go into details about the mood, as this article only deals with the indicative mood).

Below, you’ll find the sets of endings for the présent, the futur simple, and the imparfait. The endings are marked in bold in the table. The passé composé works slightly differently, so we’ll treat it separately below.

Compound tenses: The passé composé

The présent, futur simple and imparfait are called simple tenses, because they consist of only one word. On the other hand, the passé composé is a compound tense, i.e. it is made of two words, therefore its conjugation works slightly differently.

Compound tenses are always made up of an auxiliary verb, which in French can be either être (to be) or avoir (to have), and the past participle (in English, this is also the second word in a compound tense - e.g. walked, talked, done, eaten, etc.).

In compound tenses, the part that gets conjugated is the first word, i.e the auxiliary verb, while the past participle is either unchangeable (when the auxiliary verb is avoir), or changes only to agree in gender and number with the subject (when the auxiliary verb is être), as you see in the table below.

The past participle of regular verbs is also derived from the stem. For regular verbs of the first group you need to remove -er and add -é. With verbs that take auxiliary verb être, you will also need to add an -e at the end of the past participle if the subject is feminine, an -s if the subject is masculine plural or mixed, and an -es if the subject is feminine plural.

For a detailed explanation of how to conjugate and use the passé composé, check out our comprehensive guide. From now on in this article, we will group the passé composé together with the simple tenses, in order to give a comprehensive overview of the present, past, and future tenses.

Spelling-changing and stem-changing -er verbs

In the first group there are a few verbs that, while following the regular conjugation, need some spelling or stem adjustments in a few tenses, often in order to maintain the correct sound. We will give a brief overview of these cases in this section.

Verbs ending in -cer and -ger

Verbs ending in -cer and -ger, like effacer (to erase) and manger (to eat), need some spelling adjustments in the présent and imparfait in order to maintain the correct 'soft' c and g sound, where the letters -c and -g in the stem come before an -a or -o in the ending.

Verbs ending in -cer thus turn the -c to -ç in the first person plural in the présent, and also in the first, second and third person singular and third person plural in the imparfait.

Verbs ending in -ger need an -e added before the ending for the same persons in the présent and imparfait.

Stem-changing -er verbs

For some -er verbs in the présent, some persons (namely first and second plural) are conjugated using the regular stem, while another set of persons (first, second and third singular and third plural) use a modified stem. In most cases, all the forms of the futur simple also use the modified stem.

Verbs ending in -é_er

Verbs ending in _é_er (those with a grave accent in the second or third to last position before the infinitive ending) change the accent from grave to acute for the stem-changing persons in the présent.

Verbs ending in e_er

Verbs ending in e_er (those with e muet in the second to last position before the infinitive ending) change that e muet to an -è with acute accent in the stem-changing persons of the présent and all the forms of the futur simple.

Doubled consonant verbs ending in -eler and -eter

As an exception to the above rule, some verbs ending in -eler and -eter double the consonant (l or t) in the stem-changing persons of the présent and for all the forms of the futur simple.

Verbs ending in -ayer, -oyer, and -uyer

The last category of stem-changing -er verbs consists of verbs ending in -ayer, -oyer, and -uyer, which change the y to i for the stem-changing persons in the présent and for all the forms of the futur simple.

Notice that while the stem change is compulsory for -oyer and -uyer verbs, it is optional for -ayer verbs, meaning that both spellings (for example, je paye or je paie, je payerai or je paierai) are accepted.

Now that you know all about the first group of regular verbs, including the spelling adjustments required by some sub-categories of verbs, we are ready to move to the second and third groups!

-ir verbs conjugation

The second group of regular verbs have an infinitive ending in -ir. To obtain the stem of these verbs, you need to remove -ir from the infinitive and add the correct endings, which you’ll find in bold in the table below.

-re verbs conjugation

The third group of regular verbs end in -re (or -dre). Grammar books don’t usually consider these to be regular verbs, but since so many verbs ending in -dre have the same conjugation pattern, we believe it’s useful to think of these as their own group.

In order to obtain the stem of these verbs, you need to remove -re and add the correct endings, which you can find in bold in the table below.

*you don’t need to add any ending here, as the stem is the same as the conjugated form.

Great! So far we’ve seen the conjugation of all three groups of regular verbs in the present tense, future tense, imparfait and passé composé.

Now that you've got the hang of what verb conjugation means and how you conjugate 'regular' verbs, let’s move on to a new challenge – irregular verbs!

Irregular verbs

Irregular verbs do not belong to any of the three groups we’ve seen above, so their conjugation is unique, or sometimes shared among a smaller group of verbs. The idea is still that we attach endings to a stem, like for the regular verbs, and the endings are often very similar to the ones we use for regular verbs, if not the same.

However, these verbs do not follow consistent patterns like regular verbs do, so the combination of stem and endings is unique for each verb. Thus, it’s easiest to look at these verbs individually, and if possible identify patterns shared with other verbs.

It is, of course, not possible to include all irregular French verbs in this article, so we’ll just look at the ones we think are the most useful or commonly used. As you will see, often irregular verbs are not obscure verbs at all, but on the contrary, they are verbs people use every day.

Let’s start from the most important irregular verbs: avoir and être. They are not only extremely common verbs on their own, which we use in communication all the time, but also function as auxiliary verbs, meaning they make up the first word in compound tenses, as we’ve seen above for the passé composé.

They are completely irregular verbs, especially in the present tense, and it might be best to just learn them by heart!

Even in these two extremely irregular verbs, you can probably notice the patterns that make the endings very similar to, if not the same as, the regular ones. Let’s continue with two other high-frequency verbs - aller (to go) and faire (to do / to make).

You might have noticed that some tenses tend to be more regular than others. The imparfait tense, for example, is virtually always regular – in fact, only être is properly irregular in the imparfait.

We could add many more verbs to this list, but our aim here is not to give you a comprehensive list of irregular French verbs – that would be impossible in the space of an article! – but a selection of the ones that can be more useful to you as a learner.

Wrapping up

The process of French verb conjugation is key to using verbs correctly in communication and to expressing yourself correctly and fully in French. As you’ve learned in this article, the main steps of the process are getting the stem of a verb and adding the correct ending for the mood, tense, and person you need.

While regular verbs follow fixed conjugation patterns, irregular verbs have different, sometimes unique, ways of combining stem and endings.

In this article, we have provided you with a list of some of the most useful French verb patterns, which we hope will be helpful in your journey to becoming a French conjugation expert!