Conjugating verbs in 7 steps

In this article, I’m going to guide you to conjugating verbs in French through 7 steps.

Step 1. What verb is conjugated in your sentence? Find it and take the English infinitive.

It’s usually straight forward. For example, what’s the conjugated verb in the sentence “I bought a book yesterday”? Now, what’s the infinitive of that verb? Yes, the verb is “bought” and its infinitive is “to buy”. Another example, what’s the conjugated verb in the sentence: “it was a nice film”. What’s its infinitive? Are you struggling to figure it out? That’s actually normal. If you read the previous then you know what to do. If you’re stuck. There’s only one thing to do: make connections! So let’s change the personal pronoun or let’s change the tense in that sentence. If I say “it is a nice film”, does it help? What about if I say “I was” instead of “it was”, then the rest of the sentence no longer works but you can adapt it, the idea is to keep the same verb: just change when the action happens or who does the action. So do you see how you can train your brain to make connections with what you already know and find your answers? Going back to the sentence, “it was”, “I was”, “it is”, “it will….be”. Your verb is “to be”. Well done! The real difficult verb really is “to be” because it changes into a totally different bunch of letters.

Step 2: now that we have the root of the verb (the infinitive in English), we want it in French. Let’s go back to our first example: “I bought a book”. The English infinitive of “bought” is “to buy”. Great. What is it in French? The good thing is that if you don’t know it, the dictionary will have the verb at its infinitive form. Best case scenario, you already know it. “To buy” is “acheter”.

Step 3: Is the verb regular or irregular?

Essentially, in French we regroup the verbs that ended with the same letters, at their infinitive, together. The verbs that end with ER represent roughly 90% of the verbs. IR verbs represent about 5% of the verbs. RE verbs are the other 5%. We respectively call them “group 1”, “group 2” and “group 3”. But in British schools, we say “Er verbs, IR verbs and RE verbs” to make it easier. Since all verbs from each category work the same way, and by that I mean that they all change into the same bunch of letters on the end, in the dictionary appears one verb to represent them all. Usually, the representative for Er verbs is "donner" or "parler". The representative for IR verbs is "finir" or "choisir" and the RE verbs is "vendre". I like to call those verbs: “pattern verbs” or “key pattern verbs” because you will follow them to know which pattern to apply to the verb you want to conjugate. For example, “to buy”, “acheter”, is an Er verb and as such it will follow “donner”.

Where it gets tricky is that there are verbs that don’t go by the rules. They are known as "irregular verbs". They are the little rebels. There are verbs that just like to stand out at one tense in particular, others that have a quirky look (understand by that that they take one accent or double a consonant), and there are the cool verbs like “to be” in English that take a brand new form and spelling at any tense or with any personally pronouns. There are 4 main ones: to be, to have, to do and to go. For example: "to be" is "être" but "I am" is "je suis" and then "he is" is "il est" because why not. Quirky. Original. Rebel. Unique. The good news is that in the dictionary, those quirky verbs have their own page with all the tenses. Yay! The sad news is that it takes time to practice and know all those forms on top of your head.

Let’s go back into step 3: regular or irregular verb? If the verb has its own page, it’s irregular. If not, follow the pattern verb which leads us to step 4. "Acheter" is a regular" verb so...

Step 4. Which "pattern verb" does that verb follow? If the verb ends with ER, follow "donner" or "parler" or whichever verb the dictionary offers. For an IR verb, follow "finir" or "choisir". And for an "RE" verb, follow "vendre". That RE category though is divided into little categories (just when you thought conjugating was not so bad after all). Sometimes you think the verb end with RE but if you look at the previous letters, it has a “t” (like "paraître") not a “d” like the key pattern for RE verbs (“vendre”), or you see an “OIR” not an “e”… Nightmare. I know. So let’s not think about those verbs for now, they will be the centre of another article in due course, and continue into step 5.

Step 5. Look back at your verb in the English sentence and ask yourself: at what tense is that verb and who is doing the action?

As a reminder there are 5 main tenses (imperfect, perfect, present, future, conditional) and no the past doesn’t count as one single tense. In English, we don’t make the difference which is why it’s tricky when learning French to see that there are two tenses (there are actually more but I won’t go into that in this article). There is the past action that you’re describing, or that happened regularly, like a habit, several times and that is the imperfect . The other past action is the opposite: the past action happened only once at one specific moment and is called the perfect (in opposition to the imperfect. Get it?). If you are still not sure after asking yourself: am I describing an action? Did it happen once or regularly? Then try the trick: replace the verb by “used to” and then by “have or did”. Example in the sentence: “I bought a book yesterday”, does it make more sense to replace the verb by:

option 1. I used to buy a book yesterday.

option 2. I have bought a book yesterday or I did buy a book yesterday.

What do you think? If you think option 1 makes more sense, think again. Option 2 makes more sense and also, the context of the sentence confirms that “yesterday” only happened once, right? It is the perfect tense here.

Last thing, when conjugating at the perfect tense, one has to remember that there are two auxiliaries to choose from. Yes. I know. It’s getting too much and you’re fed up. You can choose to stop reading now and remain on step 5 or keep going. There are only 7 steps and you’ve done the hardest. Right. So in French we also use “to have” as an auxiliary most of the time. The reflexive verbs and DR MRS VANDERTRAMP verbs take "être". Who decided on that? No idea. It’s just the way the language works. If you can’t remember what those are, let me know in the comments and I’ll explain.

So is "acheter" a reflexive verb? Nope. It doesn’t refer back to myself, it doesn’t have the “se” at the front at the infinitive. Is it in one of the DR and MRS verbs? No, it’s not. So we will use “avoir”. Amazing, sorted.

Okay. So we know that, the verb we want to conjugate is “acheter”, that is is a regular ER verb, following “donner” or “parler”, and that it's the perfect tense that we want here, and finally we know that “I” is doing the action.

Step 6: observe the changes that keep pattern verb went through.

Here our key pattern verb is “donner”. The perfect tense of “donner” when "I" does the action is “j’ai donné”. I have lost the “r” put an accute accent on the “e” so it go up, and added “I have” (j'ai).

Great. We’re ready for step 7. Allez, c’est parti!

Step 7. Apply the changes that the key pattern verb went through to the verb you want to conjugate. Here we want to conjugate “acheter”. We know that “donner” turned into “j’ai donné” so “acheter” is going to become “j’ai acheté”. Done. Mic drop.

It might sound like a lot of thinking at first (it is, to be fair),

but once you practice asking yourself the questions again and again, it will become normal and automatic. Until then, follow the step thoroughly.

As usual, please let me know whether that helped or not, and if you have any question at all.

In the meantime remember to learn French, think French ;)