French Verb Charts

🇬🇧 How French conjugation actually works (read this once, use every chart better)

Every French verb belongs to one of three groups, and the group decides how much of the conjugation tables you actually need to memorise. The first group — infinitives in -er, model verb parler — covers roughly 90% of all French verbs and is ruthlessly regular: learn one chart, own thousands of regular verbs. The second group (-ir with -issons plurals, model finir) is smaller and just as tidy. Everything else is the third group: the irregular verbs — être, avoir, aller, faire, prendre, the -re and -oir clans — which happen to be the most common verbs in the language. That’s the deal French offers: the verbs you’ll conjugate hourly are irregular, and everything after them is pattern.

Two auxiliary verbs power all compound tenses: avoir for most verbs, être for movement/change verbs and every reflexive — j’ai parlé but je suis allé. Add the past participle and you have the passé composé, the workhorse past tense of spoken French. Beyond tense, French conjugates mood: indicative for facts, subjunctive after doubt and emotion (que je sois), conditionnel for politeness and hypotheticals (je voudrais), imperative for orders. Each verb chart on this page runs the full circuit — present, imparfait, passé composé, futur, conditionnel, subjonctif — with the traps flagged. Suggested route: auxiliaries first, then the modal-like verbs, then everyday irregulars, then let the regular models sweep up the rest of the dictionary.