French Indicative Verb Tenses

Types of verb in French There are three main categories of French regular verbs, regular verbs with an infinitive ending in -er, such as manger, regular verbs with an infinitive in -ir, such as finir, regular verbs with an infinitive in -re, such as vendre.

There are seven different moods in French conjugation: indicative (indicatif), subjunctive (subjonctif), conditional (conditionnel), imperative (impératif), infinitive (infinitif), participle (participe), and gerund (gérondif). The infinitive, participle, and gerundive are not verbal moods.

• Présent (present)
• Imparfait (imperfect)
• Passé simple (simple past)
• Passé composé (past perfect)
• Futur simple (future simple)
• Plus-que-parfait (pluperfect)
• Passé antérieur (past anterior)
• Futur antérieur (future anterior)

There are over 20 French tenses French tenses include the present, past, and future tenses.

The practice of French conjugation is not so simple. When you ask people who are learning French what it is that they find most difficult, lots of them will talk about pronunciation or speaking the language. The majority, however, still find grammar – and particularly conjugation – the most challenging aspect.

So now, let’s do a bit of verb cooking to bake fresh and healthy French tenses !

• Recipe #1 : Passé composé (“perfect”, eg : I did, I have done)
• Recipe #2 : Imparfait.
• Recipe #3 : Passé récent.
• Recipe #4 : Futur proche.
• Recipe #5 : Futur simple.
• Recipe #6 : Conditionnel présent.
• Recipe #7 : Subjonctif présent.

Present participles are never used to form tenses in French, but they can be used as verbs, either on their own or after en. They can also be used as adjectives, in which case they agree with the noun they describe. They are formed by taking the nous form of the present tense and replacing the -ons ending with -ant.

The gérondif (the gerund) is formed with en + the present participle. It is used is to stress that two actions are simultaneous. It has the same subject as the main verb.

French gerunds, called le gérondif (luh zhay-rohn-deef), consist of the present participle of a verb that ends in ant, the equivalent of the English ‘ing’ ending, such as mangeant (mahn-zhahn, eating) or parlant (pahr-lahn, speaking). In French, le gérondif is only used to express an action related to the main verb.

A pronominal verb is a verb that is accompanied by a reflexive pronoun. The verb is conjugated normally (here an -er verb) with addition of the reflexive pronouns me, te, se, nous, vous, se.

Reflexive verbs in French are verbs which mean an action done to oneself, for example, laver means ‘to wash’, but se laver means ‘to get washed’ or literally ‘to wash oneself’.

Reflexive verbs are a unique category of verbs. That’s because reflexive verbs in English aren’t their own unique word, nor do they have a special conjugation pattern. Instead, you must depend on other words within a sentence in order to identify a reflexive verb.