Parler — to speak | French Verb Chart

🇬🇧 Parler: learn this table, own ninety percent of French verbs

Parler — to speak — is the official model of the first group, and this is the most valuable table on the site for one statistical reason: roughly 90% of all French verbs conjugate exactly like it. Present: je parle, tu parles, il parle, nous parlons, vous parlez, ils parlent — and the sound rule that makes -er verbs kind to speakers and cruel to spellers: -e, -es, -ent are silent, so four of the six forms are pronounced identically (parl). Imparfait je parlais on the nous-stem, futur je parlerai on the whole infinitive, conditionnel je parlerais, subjonctif que je parle (identical to the indicative — the first group’s discount subjunctive), and passé composé j’ai parlé — with the é/er/ez homophone trio (parlé, parler, parlez all sounding the same) responsible for half the spelling errors in France.

Master this pattern and donner, aimer, habiter, travailler, écouter, regarder and thousands more conjugate themselves; the only -er outlaws are aller (fully irregular) and the spelling-adjusters (manger’s protective e, acheter’s accent boot, appeler’s double letters — each with its own chart here). Usage notes worth their space: parler takes languages directly — je parle français, no article — but people through à and topics through de: parler à quelqu’un de quelque chose. « Tu parles ! » alone is slangy disbelief (“yeah right!”), and « parlons-en » (let’s talk about it) often means the opposite. Drill the model aloud with three regular verbs of your own life until the endings are automatic — every future -er verb you meet is then already conjugated.