Person Present Ending Pronunciation je -e – tu -es – il/elle/on -e – nous -ons nasal “o” vous -ez “ay” ils/elles -ent –Įx.: aimer –> aim -er (to like) j’aim e nous aim ons tu aim es vous aim ez il/elle/on aim e ils/elles aim ent Most Common -er Verbs In the table below, you can see what the endings sound like. If you’ve already begun learning French, you’ve definitely noticed that French words are rarely phonetic, meaning that the pronunciation rules diverge from the written form. You may have also noticed that when the first letter of the next word is a vowel, the personal pronoun je (“I”) is combined with the word to form j’arrive. I am arriving / I arrive (…at 8:00 every morning) = J’arrive. The French indicative can be used to talk about habitual actions, but also to describe something happening presently or that will occur immediately. In English, the present often has an implied regularity or habitual connotation to it. To talk about something being done presently, drop the -er and add one of these endings.Įnglish often uses the present continuous (example below with arriver) instead of the present indicative, so you’ll end up using the present indicative a lot more often in French than you do in English. Conjugating Regular -er Verbs in Present Tense Simply put, to conjugate an -er verb, drop the -er and add the appropriate ending according to the person and tense.įor example, in the present tense you add -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, or -ent to the remaining stem after removing -er. The stem, or radical (from “root” in French: racine), is the part that occurs before the -er, -ir, or -re. This is where conjugation comes in.įor regular verbs, the infinitive lends its stem to its conjugated forms in a predictable way.
The equivalent meaning in English is the same as “to ,” so aimer translates to “to like.”Įxcept when stacking two verbs together (“She ”/ “ Elle ”), the infinitive form needs to change to express the who and when. You can spot them easily in French because they retain their original ending of -er, -ir, or -re. The infinitive form of a verb is its most basic form. Both English and French have a lot of irregular verbs which simply need to be memorized, but learning the rule for regular verbs makes conjugation much easier.īeing exposed to verbs in context (rather than just in a chart) is also crucial to becoming comfortable using them – not to mention it’s more fun! Use Lingvist’s French Course to see verbs in context, as well as look over grammar tips to clarify concepts explicitly as needed. In most cases (apart from irregular verbs), the English past tense is formed by adding -ed to the word. Person (Singular) Present tense Past tense First person I walk I walked Second person You walk You walked Third person He/She walks He/She walked Most verbs only change in the third person singular (see below) in English, but all verbs change to distinguish when something occurs.
Though native speakers may not notice it, English verbs also change depending on who performs it and when the action occurs. French uses one extra person category ( vous) that corresponds to addressing “you all / you guys” in English. The form of a verb changes to show who perpetrated the action (person) and when it occurred (tense).
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