Conjugation tables for the French verbs people actually look up, in every tense and mood. Each page shows the forms, explains where the irregularity bites, and gives you the sentence patterns that make the forms stick.
French verbs are where most learners stall. The endings are only half the problem: the verbs you need first are the ones that refuse to follow the rules, and the tables you find online are often generated from a pattern that quietly invents forms for the verbs that break it. Every table here is drawn from a French morphological lexicon instead, so an irregular stem shows up as an irregular stem and a verb that genuinely lacks a tense is shown as lacking it.
How to use these tables
Start with the six that carry everything
Être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir and devoir appear in a large share of French sentences, and three of them double as auxiliaries or semi-auxiliaries. Learning these six well pays off faster than learning sixty regular verbs.
Learn the pattern, not the page
Regular -er verbs all behave the same way, so once you have read one you can read the rest as confirmation. Spend your attention on the third group, where each verb has its own stem changes.
Ignore the literary tenses at first
The passé simple and the imperfect subjunctive are reading skills. They are on every page, collapsed, so you can check a form you met in a novel without them cluttering the tenses you actually speak.
French has around twenty tense-and-mood combinations, but they are built from a much smaller set of parts. Eight are compound tenses formed from avoir or être plus the past participle, so once you know the auxiliary and the participle you get all eight at once. In conversation you will mostly use the présent, passé composé, imparfait, futur simple, conditionnel and subjonctif présent.
What are the three groups of French verbs?
The first group is regular verbs ending in -er, which is the overwhelming majority and the group new verbs still join. The second group is regular verbs in -ir that add -iss- in the plural, like finir. The third group is everything else: the irregular verbs, including être, avoir, aller and every verb in -oir and -re.
When does a French verb take être instead of avoir?
Most verbs form their compound tenses with avoir. Être is used by a small set of intransitive verbs of movement and change of state, such as aller, venir, devenir, naître, mourir and rester, and by all reflexive verbs. When a verb takes être, its past participle agrees with the subject.
What is a defective verb?
A defective verb is one that genuinely lacks some forms. Clore has no imperfect and no simple past, and its present tense has no nous or vous form at all. These gaps are real features of the language, not omissions, and pages that print a complete grid for such verbs are showing you forms no French speaker uses.
Do I need to learn the passé simple?
Only to read it. The passé simple has been replaced by the passé composé in speech and in most modern writing, but it is still standard in novels, history and journalism, so you need to recognise the forms. You are very unlikely ever to need to produce one.