Lesson 2: Infinitives and Verb Types

Let's look at the anatomy of a verb. We'll use the verbs parler (to speak), finir (to finish), and vendre (to sell) as points of reference.

Every French verb breaks into two parts:

• The stem (or root) tells us what action we're talking about.
• The ending tells us things like who does that action and when—and some even more interesting things we'll meet in later lessons.

The verbs above are in their infinitive form. In French, the three main infinitive endings are ‑ER, ‑IR, and ‑RE.

The infinitive is the form you'll find in a dictionary. Here are some more verbs in their infinitive form, sorted by their endings:

To convey more information—like who is doing the action and when—we need to change, or conjugate, the verb. So how do we conjugate? To start, we'll need some subject pronouns. We'll meet those in the next lesson.