Lesson 1: Introduction to French Verbs

If you're just starting to learn French, the verb system can seem intimidating. French verbs have many more forms than English verbs, and they can change depending on who is doing the action, when it happens, and sometimes whether the speaker is stating a fact, expressing a wish, or imagining a possibility.

But French conjugation is far more systematic than it first appears. Once you understand the major patterns, hundreds of verb forms start to become predictable.

To conjugate a verb simply means to change its form to fit the sentence. We do this in English too, just on a much smaller scale.

Take the English verb walk. It has only a few basic forms:

walk, walks, walked, walking

We use those forms in different ways to talk about time:

I walked, I walk, I will walk

We can combine them with other words to express more specific meanings:

I used to walk, I am walking, I am going to walk

And most forms barely change when the subject changes:

you walk, he walks, we walk, they walk

Some English verbs change more dramatically, such as eat → ate or break → broke. But overall, English verbs have relatively few distinct forms.

English verbs have only a few forms.

French verbs change much more often. Even a single present-tense verb can have several written forms:

je parle, tu parles, il parle, nous parlons, vous parlez, ils parlent

And that's only the present tense! French also uses different forms to talk about the past, future, conditional situations, wishes, doubts, and more.

French verbs have many more forms than English verbs.

That may look like a lot to memorize, but these forms are not random. French verbs are organized into groups, recurring endings, stem patterns, and verb families. Learn a pattern once, and you can often apply it to many different verbs.

That's the approach we'll take throughout the French Verbs Crash Course. Rather than treating every conjugation as something separate to memorize, we'll build the system piece by piece and show you the patterns that connect it.

VerbMaster helps organize French conjugation into learnable patterns.

Each lesson builds on the last, moving from the basic building blocks of French verbs into the major tenses and moods you'll need to understand the system as a whole.

In VerbMaster, you'll also practice the forms you learn along the way, helping turn these patterns into conjugations you can recognize and use automatically.

Up next, we'll start with the most basic form of any French verb: the infinitive.