French Grammar Charts

📘 A sensible grammar path

• 1. Articles — French puts a little word before almost every noun; master le/la/les, un/une/des and the partitives du/de la.
• 2. Questions — three ways to ask, from casual intonation to formal inversion.
• 3. Negation — ne… pas and its friends (jamais, rien, personne), plus the pas de rule.
• 4. The past tenses — the passé composé vs imparfait choice is THE classic intermediate hurdle; our movie trick makes it click.

🇬🇧 How to use these grammar charts (and the order that saves you months)

French grammar has a reputation it only half deserves. Most of its rules are honest — gender flows into articles (le/la/les), articles into adjective endings, adjectives into agreement everywhere — so learning in the right order means each chart pays for the next. Start with the articles (the le/la/les system English lacks), then noun-adjective agreement and position, then the pronoun ladder. Only then take on the past tenses: passé composé for events, imparfait for backgrounds — the pair that runs every French story — and note that the literary passé simple can wait until you read novels. Verb conjugation lives in its own chart library; grammar charts here handle everything around the verb: word order, negation, questions, prepositions.

Two honest warnings about French grammar rules. First, every rule ships with an exception shortlist — bon becomes meilleur, the h in haricot blocks liaison, some adjectives change meaning by position (un grand homme vs un homme grand) — and the charts flag these rather than hide them. Each chart pairs the rule with examples and the moving parts named plainly — noun, adjective, adverb (the -ment family), past participle, the compound tenses built on avoir/être — because grammar vocabulary is itself vocabulary, and you can’t fix an agreement error you can’t name. Second, spoken and written French diverge: the ne of negation drops in speech (je sais pas), est-ce que replaces inversion, and on replaces nous — so each chart notes what the exam wants AND what the street says. Work one chart at a time, build three example sentences of your own per rule, and test yourself with the exercises linked in each guide: grammar sticks by production, not recognition.