How many French verb tenses are there, and how many do I actually need?

French has around twenty tense-and-mood combinations, but conversation runs on about six: présent, passé composé, imparfait, futur proche, futur simple, and conditionnel. The passé simple is literary, and you'll read it far more often than you'll ever say it.

What are the three French verb groups?

Verbs are grouped by infinitive ending. First group: -er verbs like parler, the largest and most predictable. Second group: -ir verbs like finir that add -iss- in the plural. Third group: -re verbs and the irregulars, including être, avoir, aller, and faire.

Which French verbs should I learn first?

Être (to be), avoir (to have), aller (to go), and faire (to do/make). They're irregular, they're the most frequent verbs in the language, and être and avoir double as the auxiliaries for every compound tense, so you can't form the passé composé without them.

Why do some verbs take être in the passé composé?

A small set of verbs of motion and change of state (aller, venir, partir, sortir, naître, mourir, and others), plus all reflexive verbs, use être instead of avoir. When they do, the past participle agrees with the subject in gender and number: elle est allée, ils sont allés.

How do I stop mixing up the passé composé and the imparfait?

Ask what the sentence is doing rather than when it happened. The passé composé reports a completed event that moves the story forward; the imparfait paints the background, habits, and ongoing states. Je mangeais quand il est arrivé: the eating was the setting, the arriving was the event.

French grammar · Beginner

French Verbs: Every Tense, Pattern, and Irregular, With Examples

Written by Camille Laurent, Lead French Curriculum Editor · Reviewed May 2026

French verbs change their ending to show who is acting and when. Regular verbs follow one of three patterns by infinitive ending (-er, -ir, -re), and a short list of very common irregulars (être, avoir, aller, faire) breaks those patterns and carries most everyday conversation.

What it is

A French verb's infinitive ends in -er, -ir, or -re, and you conjugate it by swapping that ending for one that matches the subject and the tense. Parler becomes je parle, tu parles, nous parlons. The ending carries the grammar, which is why French can drop almost nothing and still be understood.

Je parle français. Nous parlons français. Ils parlent français. One verb, three endings, three subjects.

How to spot it

Find the infinitive ending first, because it tells you which pattern to use. Then check whether the verb is on the short irregular list, since those are the ones you'll say most often.

parler → je parle — to speak → I speak (-er pattern)
finir → je finis — to finish → I finish (-ir pattern)
vendre → je vends — to sell → I sell (-re pattern)
être → je suis — to be → I am (irregular)

Roughly 90% of French verbs are regular -er verbs, so learning that one pattern unlocks thousands of words at once.

Verbs Quick Reference

The three regular patterns, present tense

Subject	-er (parler)	-ir (finir)	-re (vendre)
je	parle	finis	vends
tu	parles	finis	vends
il / elle / on	parle	finit	vend
nous	parlons	finissons	vendons
vous	parlez	finissez	vendez
ils / elles	parlent	finissent	vendent

All 153 verbs lessons

Verbs are where most French learners spend most of their time, and where the language rewards patience. These lessons are grouped three ways: the tenses and moods that place an action in time, the individual high-frequency verbs worth knowing cold, and the conjugation patterns that let you predict a verb you've never seen before.

Types & usage

The verbs you'll use every day, one lesson each. Être, avoir, aller, and faire alone account for a large share of spoken French, and each carries idioms that no conjugation table would tell you about.

Être — Être means to be and is the most irregular verb in French: je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont. Beyond saying what something is, it works as the auxiliary for movement verbs, for all pronominal verbs, and for the entire passive voice.
Faire — Faire covers both to do and to make, and it conjugates je fais, tu fais, il fait, nous faisons, vous faites, ils font. It also runs the French weather expressions, most sports and hobbies, and the structure faire plus an infinitive, which means to have something done.
Vouloir — Vouloir means to want and conjugates je veux, tu veux, il veut, nous voulons, vous voulez, ils veulent. Its conditional je voudrais is the polite form French uses for requests, and vouloir que is followed by the subjunctive because wanting something does not make it true.
Devoir Pouvoir Vouloir — Devoir, pouvoir and vouloir are the three French modal verbs, covering must, can and want. All three are followed directly by an infinitive with no preposition, all three share the same singular-plural stem split, and all three change meaning depending on which tense you put them in.
Pouvoir — Pouvoir means can, may, or to be able to, and conjugates je peux, tu peux, il peut, nous pouvons, vous pouvez, ils peuvent. It covers physical ability, permission and possibility, but not learned skills, which take savoir instead.
Savoir — Savoir means to know a fact or to know how to do something, and conjugates je sais, tu sais, il sait, nous savons, vous savez, ils savent. It takes a clause, an infinitive, or nothing at all, but never a person: knowing people is connaître.
Venir — Venir means to come and conjugates je viens, tu viens, il vient, nous venons, vous venez, ils viennent. It takes être in the passé composé, giving je suis venu, and with de in front of an infinitive it becomes the French way of saying have just: je viens d'arriver.
Sortir — Sortir means to go out, and by extension to come out, to be released, and — with a direct object — to take out. It drops the final consonant of its stem in the singular, giving je sors but nous sortons, and it switches between être and avoir in compound tenses depending on whether anything follows it.
Devoir — Devoir does two unrelated jobs. With an infinitive it expresses obligation or probability: je dois partir, I have to go, and il doit être malade, he must be ill. With a noun it means to owe: tu me dois dix euros. The tense you choose changes the force of the obligation, from a duty to a piece of advice to a regret.
Jouer — Jouer is a completely regular -er verb, so its endings never surprise you: je joue, nous jouons, j'ai joué. The only difficulty is spelling, because the stem ends in a vowel and swallows the letters that follow it — the e of jouerai is written but never pronounced, and nous jouions carries an i you can barely hear.
Idiomatic Pronominal Verbs — Idiomatic pronominal verbs are verbs whose meaning changes once you add a reflexive pronoun. Attendre is to wait, but s'attendre à is to expect; douter is to doubt, but se douter is to suspect. The pronoun is not doing anything reflexive here — it is simply part of a different verb, and the dictionary entry has to be learned as a unit.
Reflexive Verbs — A reflexive verb is one whose object is the same person as its subject: je me lave, I wash myself. French marks this with a pronoun in front of the verb — me, te, se, nous, vous, se — and uses the construction far more often than English, especially for everything you do to your own body.
Dire Écrire Lire — Dire (to say), écrire (to write) and lire (to read) are three irregular -re verbs that share one shape: a short stem in the singular and a longer stem in the plural. Learn je dis / nous disons, j'écris / nous écrivons, je lis / nous lisons and all three fall into place, with dit, écrit and lu as their past participles.
Auxiliary Verbs — French builds every compound tense with one of two auxiliaries, avoir or être. Most verbs take avoir (j'ai mangé); verbs of movement and change of state plus all pronominal verbs take être (elle est venue, il s'est levé). The auxiliary you pick also decides whether the past participle agrees.
Sembler — Sembler means to seem or to appear. It links straight to an adjective (elle semble contente), takes an infinitive (il semble dormir), and works impersonally as il semble que, which calls for the subjunctive. Add an indirect pronoun and it flips: il me semble que takes the indicative.
Croire — Croire means to believe, and very often simply to think. Its conjugation hinges on a y that appears in the plural (nous croyons) and vanishes in the singular (je crois). What follows it matters just as much: croire à points at a thing or an idea, croire en at a person, and croire que switches to the subjunctive as soon as you make it negative.
Impersonal Verbs — An impersonal verb in French exists only in the third person singular, with an il that refers to nobody. Weather verbs work this way (il neige, il gèle), and so do il faut, il y a, il s'agit de, il vaut mieux and il reste. Because the subject is empty, these verbs have no nous or vous forms at all.
Verbs That Take De — A large group of French verbs needs de before whatever comes next: décider de partir, parler de son travail, avoir besoin d'aide. The preposition is fixed by the verb, not by the meaning, so it has to be learned with the verb — and it elides to d' before a vowel.
Voir — Voir means to see, and in French it also covers meeting up, understanding and finding out. Its stem alternates between voi- and voy- (je vois, nous voyons), its future is the doubled-r verrai, and its participle is vu, one of the most useful past participles in the language.
Faillir — Faillir plus an infinitive is how French says that something nearly happened: j'ai failli oublier, I almost forgot. It is a defective verb, which means most of its forms have fallen out of use, and in practice you meet it in the passé composé and hardly anywhere else.
Avoir — Avoir means to have, but it does far more than that in French. It gives your age (j'ai trente ans), your physical state (j'ai faim, j'ai froid), it builds there is with il y a, and it is the auxiliary behind almost every compound tense: j'ai vu, j'avais vu, j'aurai vu.
Arriver — Arriver is a regular -er verb with three separate jobs: to arrive (je suis arrivé), to happen (ça arrive, il arrive que), and, with à plus an infinitive, to manage to do something (je n'arrive pas à dormir). It takes être in compound tenses, so its participle agrees with the subject.
Chercher — Chercher means to look for, and the whole of for is already inside the verb: je cherche mes clés, with no preposition at all. It also gives you aller chercher (to go and get), venir chercher (to come and pick up) and chercher à faire (to try to do).
Faire — Faire covers both to do and to make, and then keeps going: it reports the weather (il fait froid), it takes activities (faire du sport), it does arithmetic (deux et deux font quatre), and with an infinitive it means to have something done (faire réparer la voiture). Its conjugation is irregular in the plural and worth learning early.
Mettre — Mettre means to put, and from there it spreads out: to put on clothes (mets ta veste), to take time (je mets vingt minutes), to switch something on (mettre la radio), and, with se mettre à, to start doing something. Its participle is mis, and a whole family of verbs — permettre, promettre, remettre — copies it exactly.
Pronominal Verbs — A pronominal verb is one that carries an extra pronoun matching its subject: je me lève, tu te lèves, il se lève. That pronoun can mean myself, each other, or nothing translatable at all, and every pronominal verb takes être in compound tenses.
Laisser — Laisser means to leave something behind and, with an infinitive, to let someone do something: laisse-moi parler. It is a regular -er verb, and its difficulty is choosing it over quitter and partir, which also translate as to leave but describe leaving a place rather than leaving a thing.
Il y a — Il y a means there is and there are, with one single form for both. It is built from the impersonal il, the pronoun y meaning there, and the verb avoir, and it never becomes plural. Combined with a length of time it does a second job entirely: il y a trois ans means three years ago.
Falloir — Falloir expresses necessity, and it exists only as il faut. With an infinitive it states a general obligation (il faut partir); with que plus the subjunctive it aims that obligation at somebody (il faut que tu partes); and with a noun it means to need (il me faut du temps).
Agreement with Vous — Vous always takes a plural verb — vous êtes, vous avez, vous parlez — but adjectives and past participles agree with the person or people it actually refers to. One woman gives vous êtes prête; two men give vous êtes prêts. The verb never changes; everything else does.
Dire — Dire means to say and to tell, and it is one of only three verbs in French with the irregular ending -tes in the vous form: vous dites, not *vous disez. It reports speech (il dit que...), passes on instructions (dis-lui de venir), and supplies the everyday phrase for meaning something at all: vouloir dire.
Tenir — Tenir means to hold, and everything else it does grows out of that: holding a promise (tenir parole), holding on to an opinion (tenir à), and holding a resemblance from a parent (tenir de). Its conjugation copies venir exactly, with the diphthong stem tien- in the singular and ten- in the plural.
Aimer — J'aime means I like or I love, from the verb aimer. It is a fully regular -er verb, so the whole conjugation follows from the stem aim-, and the only things that need attention are the elision in j'aime, the liaison in nous aimons, and the article French insists on putting after it.
Aller — Aller means to go, but French also uses it for how you are (je vais bien), for whether something suits you (cette veste te va bien), and for the near future (je vais partir). Its conjugation is one of the most irregular in the language, drawing forms from three different Latin verbs: vais, irai, and allons.
Depuis vs. Il y a — Depuis measures a stretch of time that is still running, and it takes the present tense: j'attends depuis une heure, I have been waiting for an hour. Il y a measures backwards from now to a finished event, and it means ago: je suis arrivé il y a une heure. The same number can appear in both, describing the same situation from opposite ends.
Manquer — Manquer means to miss, but in the emotional sense it reverses the sentence: tu me manques means I miss you, not you miss me. The person who is absent becomes the subject and the person who feels the absence becomes an indirect object, because the verb really means to be lacking to someone.
Penser — Penser means to think, and the preposition after it decides which kind of thinking you mean. Penser à is having something on your mind; penser de is holding an opinion about it, and it appears almost only in questions. Penser que introduces what you believe, and it flips to the subjunctive as soon as you make it negative.
Prendre — Prendre means to take, but French uses it far more widely than English does: you prendre a train, a coffee, a decision, and a photograph. Its stem shifts three ways as you conjugate it (je prends, nous prenons, ils prennent), and every verb built on it, from apprendre to comprendre, follows the same pattern.
Passer — Passer is a regular -er verb with an unusual habit: it takes avoir when it has a direct object (j'ai passé une semaine à Nice) and être when it doesn't (je suis passé chez toi). It also means to sit an exam rather than to pass one, and in its pronominal form se passer it means to happen.
Jouer — Jouer is the French verb for to play, and the preposition that follows it tells you what kind of playing you mean. Games and sports take à (jouer au foot), musical instruments take de (jouer de la guitare), and a role or a piece of music is a plain direct object (jouer Hamlet).
Verbs That Take À — A large group of French verbs requires à before their complement, either in front of a person (téléphoner à sa mère) or in front of an infinitive (commencer à travailler). The preposition belongs to the verb, not to the meaning, so it has to be learned with the verb rather than guessed from English.
Faire Causative — The causative is faire plus an infinitive, and it says that the subject arranged an action rather than performed it: je fais réparer ma voiture means someone else does the repairing. It covers both English have something done and make someone do something, and the past participle fait never agrees in this construction.
Avoir Besoin De — French has no everyday verb meaning to need. Instead it says avoir besoin de, literally to have need of, so the verb you conjugate is avoir and the complement always follows de: j'ai besoin d'aide, tu as besoin de dormir. That de also decides what happens to the article after it.
Verb Agreement — French verbs agree twice over: the conjugated verb matches its subject in person and number, and the past participle may additionally match a noun in gender and number. Which noun it matches depends on the auxiliary, which is why elle est partie has an extra e but elle a parti never occurs.
Agreement with Subjects — Every French verb takes its person and number from its subject, and the past participle of an être verb takes its gender and number from the same place. The rule is simple; identifying the subject is not, because compound subjects, quantity expressions, on, and the polite vous all count differently from what English would suggest.
Essentially Pronominal Verbs — A small group of French verbs exists only in the pronominal form: there is no verb souvenir or évanouir, only se souvenir and s'évanouir. Because the pronoun is part of the verb rather than an object, these verbs always take être and their past participle always agrees with the subject.
Finir — Finir means to finish, and it is the model verb for the regular -ir conjugation: an -iss- appears in the plural (nous finissons) and throughout the imperfect. Two constructions decide its meaning: finir de plus an infinitive is completing an action, while finir par plus an infinitive is ending up doing something.
Using Impersonal Expressions — Impersonal expressions are built on an il that refers to nobody: il faut, il vaut mieux, il est important, il paraît. They comment on an action rather than describe a person, and the only real decision they force on you is what comes next — de plus an infinitive, or que plus a clause whose verb may be subjunctive or indicative.
Verbs with Prepositions — French verbs fall into three groups according to what they need before an infinitive: nothing at all (je veux partir), à (je commence à partir), or de (j'essaie de partir). The choice belongs to the individual verb, so the preposition has to be learned as part of the vocabulary item rather than worked out from the meaning.
Reciprocal Verbs — A reciprocal verb uses the pronouns nous, vous, or se to mean each other rather than oneself: nous nous écrivons means we write to one another. The subject has to be plural, and the past participle only agrees when that pronoun is a direct object, which is why ils se sont vus has an s and ils se sont parlé does not.
Agreement with Direct Objects — With avoir, a French past participle normally stays flat: j'ai écrit les lettres. It only takes gender and number endings when the direct object has already appeared before the verb, which happens with object pronouns, with the relative que, and in questions. Indirect objects and the pronoun en never trigger it.
Agreement with Pronominal Verbs — Every pronominal verb takes être in the passé composé, but the participle does not automatically agree. You have to treat the sentence as though the auxiliary were avoir: the participle agrees only when the reflexive pronoun is a direct object. That is why elle s'est levée agrees and elle s'est lavé les mains does not.
Modal Verbs — French has no modal auxiliaries in the English sense. Where English uses short, unchangeable words like can, must and may, French uses ordinary verbs — pouvoir, devoir, vouloir, savoir, falloir — which conjugate in full, take a bare infinitive after them, and carry the sense of might, should and would in their own endings rather than in a separate word.
To Make — English make covers so much ground that no single French verb can follow it. Faire handles producing and doing, rendre handles making someone feel a certain way, faire plus an infinitive handles making someone do something, and a long list of fixed phrases — prendre une décision, gagner de l'argent — uses neither.
Verbs with Pour — Pour after a verb almost always answers the question why. With an infinitive it gives the purpose of the action (je sors pour acheter du pain), and a small set of verbs — voter, opter, remercier, prendre, passer — governs pour as their own fixed preposition. When the purpose belongs to someone else, pour becomes pour que and pulls the subjunctive in with it.
Visit — French splits the English verb visit in two. Visiter is for places you go round and look at — a city, a museum, a flat you are thinking of renting. People take rendre visite à, or, far more often in conversation, aller voir. Using visiter with a person is a small mistake that sounds strange rather than wrong.
Action vs. Being Verbs — French sorts verbs into two families. Action verbs say what the subject does, and they are modified by adverbs: elle chante bien. Being verbs — être, sembler, paraître, devenir, rester and a few others — say what the subject is, and they are followed by an adjective that agrees with the subject: elle semble fatiguée. Choosing the wrong family is what produces elle semble fatiguement.
Semi Auxiliary Verbs — A semi-auxiliary is a fully conjugated verb that joins an infinitive and adds a shade of time, aspect, or attitude rather than a meaning of its own. Aller places an action just ahead, venir de places it just behind, être en train de holds it in progress, and devoir, pouvoir and vouloir add obligation, possibility and intention.
Semi Auxiliary Verbs Word Order — When two verbs sit side by side in French — a conjugated one and an infinitive — everything else in the sentence has to find a place around them. Negation closes around the conjugated verb, object pronouns attach to the infinitive, and adverbs slot in between. Faire and laisser break the pronoun rule, and that exception is worth learning separately.
Verbs of Perception — Voir, entendre, écouter, regarder and sentir can be followed directly by an infinitive, with no que and no preposition: je vois les enfants jouer. French also allows the two elements to swap places, and the past participle of the perception verb agrees only when what precedes it is the thing performing the infinitive's action.
Marcher, Se Promener, and Aller à Pied — English uses walk for the movement, the outing, and the way you got somewhere. French splits them. Marcher is the physical act of putting one foot in front of the other, se promener is going out for pleasure, promener is taking someone or something else out, and aller à pied says how you travelled.
Sentir Bon vs. Se Sentir Bien — Sentir bon means to smell good and describes what other people notice about you. Se sentir bien means to feel well and describes what you notice about yourself. The reflexive pronoun changes the meaning, and it also changes the word that follows: bon with sentir, bien with se sentir.
Love and Hate — French runs liking and disliking along one scale, from adorer at the top down through aimer and ne pas aimer to détester and haïr at the bottom. The oddity in the middle is that adding an adverb to aimer weakens it: j'aime Paul means one thing and j'aime bien Paul means considerably less.
De Qui, Dont, and Duquel — When a relative clause needs to carry a de — because the verb inside it is parler de, avoir besoin de, se souvenir de — French offers three ways to do it. Dont is the general one and works for people and things alike. De qui is a formal alternative for people. Duquel is obligatory when the de belongs to a longer preposition such as à côté de or au milieu de.

Patterns

The regular families. Learn the -er pattern first, then -ir and -re, then the stem-changing verbs that look regular until the stress lands on the stem.

Regular -ir Verbs — Regular -ir verbs like finir and choisir take the endings -is, -is, -it, -issons, -issez, -issent in the present tense. The plural forms insert -iss- before the ending, which is what separates this group from the irregular -ir verbs such as partir and ouvrir.
Regular -er Verbs — Regular -er verbs are the biggest group in French: roughly nine verbs in ten belong to it. You drop the -er from the infinitive and add -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent. Learn that one set of endings and you can conjugate thousands of verbs, including almost every new verb French invents.
Irregular -re Verbs — Irregular -re verbs are the group that contains most of French's high-frequency verbs: prendre, mettre, dire, écrire, boire, connaître, faire, être. Almost all of them work on two stems — a short one for je, tu, il and a longer one for nous, vous, ils — which turns an apparently random list into about eight learnable families.
Regular -re Verbs — Regular -re verbs are the smallest of the three French conjugation groups. Remove the -re and add -s, -s, nothing, -ons, -ez, -ent, so vendre gives je vends, tu vends, il vend. The bare third-person singular is what makes this group instantly recognisable.
Irregular Adjectives — Most French adjectives add -e for the feminine and -s for the plural. Irregular adjectives do something else: doux becomes douce, blanc becomes blanche, heureux stays heureux in the masculine plural, and beau, nouveau, and vieux have a fifth form used before a vowel.
Stem Changing Verbs — Stem changing verbs are -er verbs whose stem vowel shifts when the ending after it is silent: acheter gives j'achète but nous achetons, appeler gives j'appelle but nous appelons. The endings stay completely regular; only the stem is rewritten, and always in the same four persons.
Irregular -ir Verbs — Irregular -ir verbs are the -ir verbs that refuse the -iss- pattern. They split into three tidy families: partir and dormir drop their final stem consonant in the singular, ouvrir and offrir borrow the -er endings, and venir and tenir change vowel in four of the six forms.
-ier Verbs — Verbs ending in -ier, such as étudier, oublier, and remercier, are ordinary -er verbs whose stem happens to end in i. That produces two oddities in writing: a doubled i in the imperfect and subjunctive forms of nous and vous, and a silent e that follows the i in four of the six present-tense forms.
Nouns Regular Feminines and Plurals — The default rules are short: add -e to make a noun or adjective feminine, add -s to make it plural, and add -es for both at once. Nouns already ending in -e don't change for gender, and nouns ending in -s, -x, or -z don't change for number.
Irregular -er Verbs — French has exactly one genuinely irregular -er verb: aller. Everything else in -er keeps the standard endings and only adjusts its stem, which is why grammars usually treat envoyer, acheter, appeler, and préférer as almost-regular rather than irregular.
Irregular Verbs — An irregular French verb is one whose stem changes in ways the infinitive doesn't predict. There are roughly three hundred of them out of thousands of verbs, but they include the ones you use in almost every sentence: être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, savoir, venir, prendre.
Mastering Verb Conjugations — French conjugation looks enormous on a chart and is much smaller in practice. Four ending sets cover almost every tense, one stem serves both the future and the conditional, and every compound tense reuses a single past participle. Learning the overlaps is what turns a wall of tables into a system.
Nouns and Adjectives Irregular Feminine Forms — When a French noun or adjective doesn't just add -e for the feminine, the change is almost always predictable from its ending. -eur becomes -euse or -trice, -er becomes -ère, -f becomes -ve, -x becomes -se, and -en, -on, -el, and -et double their consonant.
Spelling Change Verbs — Spelling change verbs are the -cer and -ger verbs that add a cedilla or an extra e before a or o: commencer gives nous commençons, manger gives nous mangeons. Nothing about the pronunciation changes. The spelling changes precisely so that it doesn't.
Verb Conjugation — Conjugating a French verb means splitting it into a stem and an ending, then choosing the ending that matches the person, the tense, and the mood you need. The stem says which verb and roughly when; the ending says who. Every French verb form is one of those two pieces attached to the other.

Tenses & moods

When something happens, and how certain you are that it does. The passé composé and imparfait pair is the single biggest hurdle in French, and the subjunctive is the one that arrives last.

Imperfect — The imparfait is the French past tense for situations rather than events: what used to happen, what was going on, what things were like. You build it from the nous form of the present plus the endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient, and être is the only verb that breaks the pattern.
Past Participle — The past participle (le participe passé) is the verb form that builds every compound tense in French: parlé, fini, vendu. It carries no person ending of its own, so the auxiliary avoir or être does all the conjugating. Its one variable is agreement, which adds -e and -s in some structures and not in others.
Pouvoir in the Future Tense — Pouvoir in the future tense runs on the irregular stem pourr-, giving je pourrai, tu pourras, il pourra. It means will be able to or will be allowed to, and the double r is the only thing separating it from the conditional pourrais, could. The endings are the ordinary future endings, so the stem is the single thing to memorise.
Imperfect Conjugations — The imperfect (l'imparfait) is the most predictable tense in French: take the nous form of the present, cut off -ons, and add -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient. Verbs that are chaotic in the present — faire, boire, prendre — become perfectly regular here, because the stem comes from a form you already know. Être is the only verb in the language that needs its own stem.
Passé Composé vs. Imparfait — French has two everyday past tenses and the choice between them is not about how long ago something happened. The passé composé reports a completed event that moves the story forward; the imparfait paints the background it happened in — descriptions, habits, and states with no stated beginning or end. The same verb can take either, and the tense you pick changes what the sentence claims.
Giving Orders — French gives orders with the imperative, a stripped-down verb form that has only three persons and no subject pronoun at all: parle, parlons, parlez. Because a bare imperative can sound abrupt, the language also has a set of gentler structures — the conditional, the future, veuillez plus an infinitive — that give the same instruction without sounding like a command.
Impersonal Orders — An impersonal order tells nobody in particular what to do. French gives it in the infinitive rather than the imperative — mélanger, ne pas toucher, ralentir — which is why recipes, road signs, and instruction leaflets read so differently from spoken commands. The negative stays in one block in front of the verb: ne pas fumer, never ne fumer pas.
Passé Simple — The passé simple is the tense French novels are written in. It reports a finished past event exactly as the passé composé does, but it belongs to writing rather than speech: nobody says je parlai to describe their morning. For most learners it is a tense to recognise on the page rather than one to produce.
Future Tense — The French future tense (le futur simple) says what will happen. You build it by adding the endings -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, -ont to the infinitive itself, so parler becomes je parlerai. Those endings are the present tense of avoir, which is why they're easier to remember than they look.
Tu Imperative — The tu imperative is how you tell one person you know well to do something. You take the present-tense tu form and delete the pronoun, and for -er verbs you also delete the final -s: tu parles becomes parle. A handful of verbs (être, avoir, savoir, vouloir) build the form from the subjunctive instead.
Present Tense — The French present tense (le présent) is one form doing the work of three English ones: je mange means I eat, I am eating, and I do eat. You build it by cutting the infinitive ending off and adding a set of endings that depend on whether the verb ends in -er, -ir, or -re.
Passé Composé — Le passé composé is the everyday French past tense, used for finished actions. It is built from two pieces: the present tense of avoir or être, plus the past participle of the main verb. J'ai mangé means both I ate and I have eaten.
Venir Recent Past — Venir de plus an infinitive is how French says to have just done something. Je viens de manger means I've just eaten. The construction exists in only two tenses: the present, for something that has just happened, and the imperfect, for something that had just happened.
Verb Tense — A French verb tense places an action in time. French has simple tenses, formed from a stem and an ending, and compound tenses, formed from an auxiliary plus a past participle. Every compound tense is built from a simple tense of avoir or être, so learning the simple ones gives you the compound ones for free.
Passé Composé Conjugations — Conjugating the passé composé means conjugating only the auxiliary. Avoir or être takes the person and the tense, the past participle stays fixed unless agreement applies, so learning six forms of avoir and six of être gives you the whole tense for every verb in French.
Past Perfect — The French past perfect, le plus-que-parfait, says that something had already happened before another past event. It is built from the imperfect of avoir or être plus a past participle: j'avais fini, j'étais parti. Its job is to step one level further back in time than the rest of the sentence.
Pluperfect Subjunctive — The pluperfect subjunctive, le plus-que-parfait du subjonctif, is the literary counterpart of the past subjunctive. It is built from the imperfect subjunctive of avoir or être plus a past participle: qu'il eût compris, qu'elle fût partie. Modern French replaces it with the past subjunctive or the indicative plus-que-parfait, so it is a reading tense rather than a speaking one.
Future Perfect — The French future perfect, le futur antérieur, says that something will already be over by a given point in the future. It is the future of avoir or être plus a past participle: j'aurai mangé, je serai parti. It also has a second life as a way of guessing at what has probably happened.
Imperative Mood — The imperative mood, l'impératif, is the form French uses for orders, instructions, advice, and invitations. It has only three persons — tu, nous, and vous — and it drops the subject pronoun entirely, so parlez is a command while vous parlez is a statement.
Reported Speech — Reported speech, le discours indirect, is how you relay what someone said without quoting them. French links the report to the original with que, and when the reporting verb is in the past it shifts the tenses back: « Je viens » becomes il a dit qu'il venait.
Si Clauses Conditionals — A si clause states a condition and the other half of the sentence states its consequence. French locks the two halves together in three fixed pairings: si plus the present with the future, si plus the imperfect with the conditional, and si plus the plus-que-parfait with the conditional perfect. A future or a conditional can never follow si itself.
Vouloir in the Future Tense — Vouloir has the irregular future stem voudr-, giving je voudrai, tu voudras, il voudra, nous voudrons, vous voudrez, ils voudront. The same stem produces the conditional je voudrais, which differs by a single silent letter and means something quite different: I would like rather than I will want.
Past Participle Conjugations — The past participle is the second half of every compound tense in French. Regular verbs form it predictably — parlé, fini, vendu — and about eighty irregular participles cover the rest. It also works as an adjective, which is why it sometimes takes an ending to agree with a noun.
Subjunctive — The subjunctive is the mood French uses when a verb is presented as wanted, doubted, feared, or required rather than simply stated. It almost always appears in a subordinate clause after que, and the trigger is the verb or conjunction in front of it, not the meaning of the verb in the clause itself.
Subjunctive Conjugations — The present subjunctive is built from the ils form of the present indicative: drop -ent and add -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent. That single rule covers almost every verb in French, including most that are irregular in the indicative, because their irregularity is already inside the stem you are borrowing.
Conditional Perfect — The conditional perfect (le conditionnel passé) describes a past that never happened: avoir or être in the conditional plus a past participle, as in j'aurais accepté, I would have accepted. Because unrealised pasts are where regret and blame live, this is also the tense that carries French's should have and could have.
Conditional Mood — The conditional is a mood, not a tense: it presents an action as depending on something rather than as fact. It is built by taking the future stem — usually the whole infinitive — and adding the imperfect endings, so parler gives je parlerais. It covers politeness, hypotheses, advice, and anything a French speaker wants to say without committing to it.
Infinitive — The infinitive is the verb before anything has been done to it: no person, no tense, no mood. French infinitives end in -er, -ir, -re, or -oir, and in a sentence the infinitive is almost always the second verb, the one depending on a conjugated verb or on a preposition.
Passé Simple Conjugations — The passé simple has three sets of endings and around thirty irregular stems, and that is the whole tense. There is no auxiliary, no participle, and no agreement, so once you have the stem the form is settled. The third person singular tells you which set you are in: -a, -it, or -ut.
Past Infinitive — The past infinitive is an infinitive that has already happened: avoir or être in the infinitive plus a past participle, as in avoir mangé or être parti. It says the action was finished before the main verb took place, and it is compulsory after après. English usually renders it with -ing or with a perfect: after eating, thanks for coming, for having lied.
Past Perfect Conjugations — Conjugating the plus-que-parfait means conjugating avoir or être in the imperfect and adding a past participle. Twelve auxiliary forms — avais, avais, avait, avions, aviez, avaient and étais, étais, était, étions, étiez, étaient — generate the past perfect of every verb in French.
Subjunctive Irregular Conjugations — Ten French verbs have a present subjunctive that cannot be derived from the indicative: être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir, savoir, vouloir, valoir, falloir, and pleuvoir. Because they are also among the most frequent verbs in the language, these ten forms account for most of the subjunctives you will ever hear.
Passive Reflexive — French can express a passive idea without using être at all. Put a thing in the subject slot, add se, and conjugate the verb normally: ce plat se mange froid, this dish is eaten cold. Grammatically the dish appears to be eating itself; in practice the construction simply removes the agent from the sentence altogether.
Passive Voice — A passive sentence promotes the object of an action to subject. French builds it with être plus a past participle, and because the auxiliary is être, the participle agrees with the new subject in gender and number. Le comité approuve le projet becomes le projet est approuvé par le comité.
Aller Near Future — The near future, le futur proche, is aller in the present tense plus an infinitive: je vais partir, I'm going to leave. Only aller changes for the person; the second verb stays in its dictionary form. It is the future most French speakers actually use in conversation.
Conditional Mood Conjugations — The conditional is built from the future stem plus the imperfect endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient. Because the stem always ends in r, every conditional form in French contains an r before its ending: je parlerais, tu ferais, nous pourrions. It carries the meaning of English would.
Negative Imperative — To tell someone not to do something, wrap ne … pas around the imperative form: ne parle pas, ne partons pas, n'attendez pas. The one thing that changes is the pronouns, which move back in front of the verb and lose their hyphens.
Present Participle — The French present participle is the -ant form: parlant, finissant, attendant. You build it from the nous form of the present tense by replacing -ons with -ant. With en in front of it, it becomes the gérondif and means while doing or by doing.
Voice — Voice, la voix, describes the relationship between a verb and its subject. French has three: the active voice, where the subject acts; the passive voice, built with être plus a past participle, where the subject is acted upon; and the pronominal voice, where a reflexive pronoun makes the action happen to the subject itself.
Vouloir and Avoir in the Passé Composé — Vouloir forms its passé composé with avoir and the past participle voulu: j'ai voulu, tu as voulu, il a voulu. In this tense it rarely means wanted in the vague sense; it reports a decision that was acted on, and its negative, je n'ai pas voulu, means I refused.
Future Tense Conjugations — Every French verb takes the same six future endings: -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, -ont. What varies is the stem, which for regular verbs is the infinitive itself, minus the final e of -re verbs. A short list of verbs has an irregular stem, and a slightly longer one has a predictable spelling change.
Past Anterior — The passé antérieur is a literary compound tense: avoir or être in the passé simple plus a past participle, as in il eut fini or elle fut partie. It marks an action completed just before another action in the passé simple, and it appears almost exclusively in written narration.
Subjunctive with Conjunctions — A group of French conjunctions always takes the subjunctive: bien que, pour que, avant que, jusqu'à ce que, à moins que, sans que, pourvu que and a few more. They share a common thread, in that each one presents its clause as unrealised, hypothetical or merely conceded rather than as a plain fact.
Conditional Perfect Conjugations — The conditional perfect, le conditionnel passé, puts avoir or être into the conditional and adds a past participle: j'aurais fini, je serais parti. It says what would have happened, and it is the tense French uses for regret about the past.
Future Perfect Conjugations — The future perfect, le futur antérieur, is avoir or être in the future plus a past participle: j'aurai fini, je serai parti. It describes something that will already be over by a given point in the future, and it is compulsory after quand and dès que when one future action precedes another.
Imperative Mood Conjugations — The French imperative has only three forms, for tu, nous and vous, and each one is the present tense with the subject pronoun removed: parle, parlons, parlez. Verbs in -er drop the final s of the tu form, and four verbs take their imperative from the subjunctive instead.
Past Subjunctive — The past subjunctive, le subjonctif passé, is the subjunctive of avoir or être plus a past participle: que j'aie fini, que je sois parti. You use it in exactly the same places as the present subjunctive, but for an action that is already complete when the main verb speaks.
Compound Tenses Word Order — In a compound tense, French fills a fixed sequence of slots: subject, ne, object pronouns, auxiliary, pas, past participle. Short adverbs slip in between the auxiliary and the participle, and negative words such as rien and personne land on opposite sides of it.
Prendre in the Present Subjunctive — In the present subjunctive, prendre has two stems: prenn- for je, tu, il and ils, and pren- for nous and vous. That gives que je prenne, que tu prennes, qu'il prenne, que nous prenions, que vous preniez, qu'ils prennent, and every compound of prendre follows the same pattern.
Être En Train De — Être en train de plus an infinitive is the French way of insisting that an action is underway right now. French has no progressive tense, so je mange covers both I eat and I am eating; être en train de is what you add when the fact that it's happening at this moment is the point.
Irregular Future and Conditional Stems — Le futur simple and le conditionnel présent are built from the same stem, and for most verbs that stem is the infinitive. About twenty verbs replace it with something short and unrecognisable — ir- for aller, aur- for avoir, verr- for voir. Learn one of those stems and you have learnt it for both tenses at once.
Passive Infinitive — A passive infinitive is a passive with nothing conjugated inside it: être stays in the infinitive and a past participle follows. It appears after devoir and pouvoir, after prepositions, and after verbs of seeming. The participle still agrees, and it agrees with the subject of the conjugated verb further back in the sentence.
Past Subjunctive Conjugations — The past subjunctive is the present subjunctive of avoir or être plus a past participle: que j'aie fini, qu'elle soit partie. Nothing new has to be learnt about the verb itself, only about the auxiliary. What the tense adds is timing — the action is already complete at the moment the main clause describes.
Perfect Participle — The perfect participle is ayant or étant plus a past participle: ayant fini, étant arrivé. It translates having done something and says that action was over before the main verb began. Both halves of the sentence must share one subject, and the form belongs chiefly to written French.
Verb Mood — Mood is what the speaker is doing with the action rather than when it happens. French has four moods with personal endings — indicative for facts, subjunctive for what is wanted or doubted, conditional for hypotheses, imperative for orders — plus the infinitive and the participle, which have no subject at all.
Conjugate Faire in Le Conditionnel Present — Faire in the conditional present runs on the stem fer-, which keeps nothing of the infinitive. Add the imperfect endings and you have je ferais, tu ferais, il ferait, nous ferions, vous feriez, ils feraient. The stem is the only thing to memorise; the endings are ones you already know.
Imperfect Subjunctive — The imperfect subjunctive is the subjunctive of literature: where modern French writes qu'il parte, a nineteenth-century novel writes qu'il partît. It is built on the passé simple stem with the endings -sse, -sses, circumflex plus t, -ssions, -ssiez, -ssent, and outside a few frozen phrases nobody produces it any more.
Indirect Speech — Direct speech quotes what was said; indirect speech folds it into your own sentence with que, si or de. Three things move in the process — the pronouns, the tense, and any word anchored to the original moment of speaking. Nothing else changes.
Literary Tenses Moods — French keeps four tenses for writing only: le passé simple, le passé antérieur, l'imparfait du subjonctif and le plus-que-parfait du subjonctif. Each has an exact spoken equivalent, none is used in conversation, and all four have to be read fluently by anyone opening a French novel.
Passé Composé Imparfait — French splits the past between two tenses. The passé composé reports a finished event that moves the story forward (le téléphone a sonné), while the imparfait describes the situation that event landed in (je lisais). The choice is not about how long ago something happened but about whether you are narrating or describing.
Passive Voice Conjugations — The French passive is built from être plus a past participle, and the tense of the sentence lives entirely in être. Because être is the auxiliary, the participle always agrees with the subject: la lettre est envoyée, les lettres sont envoyées. The person who did it, if you mention them at all, comes after par.
Periphrastic Tenses — A periphrastic tense is one built from a helper verb plus an infinitive instead of an ending. French has three in daily use: aller plus an infinitive for the near future, venir de plus an infinitive for the recent past, and être en train de plus an infinitive for something happening right now.
Sortir with Avoir or Être — Sortir takes être in the passé composé when nobody is being taken out: je suis sorti means I went out. As soon as sortir has a direct object it switches to avoir and means to take something out: j'ai sorti la voiture. The auxiliary is not a spelling choice, it tells you which of the two verbs you are reading.
Verb Timeline — French has around twenty conjugated forms spread across four moods, but only about ten are used in speech. Laid out on a timeline they fall into a simple pattern: every point in time has a simple tense for the action itself and a compound tense for whatever happened just before it.
Entrer with Avoir or Être — The past participle of entrer is entré, and it agrees with the subject when the verb takes être: elle est entrée, ils sont entrés. Entrer only takes avoir in its transitive sense of entering something into a system or a container, as in j'ai entré les données, and then the participle stops agreeing with the subject.
Faire + Infinitive — Faire followed straight by an infinitive means you are not doing the action yourself, you are arranging for it to be done: je fais repeindre la cuisine, I'm having the kitchen repainted. The same structure also covers making someone do something, as in il m'a fait attendre.
Au Cas Où — French says in case with au cas où, and unlike almost every other conjunction it is followed by the conditional, not the present or the subjunctive. Au cas où tu aurais faim, il y a du pain. On its own at the end of a sentence, au cas où means just in case.
Past Infinitive Conjugations — The past infinitive is avoir or être in the infinitive plus a past participle: avoir mangé, être parti, s'être trompé. It names an action already finished at the moment the sentence is talking about, and French requires it after après and after any verb of thanking, regretting, or admitting.
Present Participle Conjugations — The French present participle ends in -ant and is built from the nous form of the present tense: nous parlons gives parlant, nous finissons gives finissant. Only three verbs are irregular, and the form is used mainly in the gérondif, en parlant, to say while or by doing something.
Simple Compound Tenses Moods — A simple tense in French is one word, with the person and the timing inside the ending: je chantais. A compound tense is two words, an auxiliary plus a past participle: j'avais chanté. Every simple tense has a compound partner, and the partner always means the action was already over.
Subjunctive with Negative and Indefinite Pronouns — When a relative clause describes something that does not exist or has not been found yet, French puts its verb in the subjunctive. That is why je ne connais personne qui sache and je cherche quelqu'un qui sache both take sache, while j'ai un ami qui sait takes the indicative.
Variable Subjunctive — A small group of French verbs takes the indicative when you assert something and the subjunctive when you deny it or ask about it. Je pense qu'il vient states a belief, while je ne pense pas qu'il vienne withdraws it, and the mood moves with the certainty.

Overviews

Start here if you want the shape of the whole system before the detail.

The 10 Most Common French Verbs — The ten most frequent French verbs are être, avoir, faire, dire, pouvoir, aller, voir, savoir, vouloir, and venir. All ten are irregular, and between them they carry a remarkable share of everything anyone says in French, because most of them do grammatical work on top of their own meaning.
Introduction to French Verbs — A French verb is the word that says what happens, and it carries far more information than its English equivalent. Its ending tells you who is acting, when, and in what mood, which is why French verbs are listed by their infinitive and then rebuilt for every situation.

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Verbs FAQs

How many French verb tenses are there, and how many do I actually need?: French has around twenty tense-and-mood combinations, but conversation runs on about six: présent, passé composé, imparfait, futur proche, futur simple, and conditionnel. The passé simple is literary, and you'll read it far more often than you'll ever say it.
What are the three French verb groups?: Verbs are grouped by infinitive ending. First group: -er verbs like parler, the largest and most predictable. Second group: -ir verbs like finir that add -iss- in the plural. Third group: -re verbs and the irregulars, including être, avoir, aller, and faire.
Which French verbs should I learn first?: Être (to be), avoir (to have), aller (to go), and faire (to do/make). They're irregular, they're the most frequent verbs in the language, and être and avoir double as the auxiliaries for every compound tense, so you can't form the passé composé without them.
Why do some verbs take être in the passé composé?: A small set of verbs of motion and change of state (aller, venir, partir, sortir, naître, mourir, and others), plus all reflexive verbs, use être instead of avoir. When they do, the past participle agrees with the subject in gender and number: elle est allée, ils sont allés.
How do I stop mixing up the passé composé and the imparfait?: Ask what the sentence is doing rather than when it happened. The passé composé reports a completed event that moves the story forward; the imparfait paints the background, habits, and ongoing states. Je mangeais quand il est arrivé: the eating was the setting, the arriving was the event.