Giáo trình động từ tiếng Pháp - Part I Living in the Here and Now: The Present Indicative -

Chapter 2

Conjugating Regular Verbs

in the Present Tense

In This Chapter

Categorizing French verbs

Creating present-tense -er, -ir, and -re verbs

Including adverbs

Making complete sentences

In French, you use the present tense in everyday conversation. In fact, it’s the building

block in forming sentences and expressing thoughts. You use the present tense to com￾municate things that are happening in your life, your job, and the world around you in the

here and now. You also use the present tense to express ongoing actions in the present and

to emphasize actions.

The present tense in French has three different meanings in English. For example, Je parle

means not only I speak, but also I am speaking and I do speak. You can also use the present

tense to express actions that you repeat over and over again. For instance, Nous travaillons

le samedi means We work on Saturdays, meaning that we work every Saturday and therefore

it expresses habitual action in the present. In French, the present tense is important because

the stem of other tenses, such as the imperfect and the subjunctive, are derived from it.

In this chapter, I focus on conjugating this basic building block — the present tense. I first

briefly classify the three regular types of verbs, and then I show you how to conjugate each

one. Finally, I throw in some adverbs to help you make complete (and interesting) sentences.

Classifying Regular Present-Tense Verbs

The French language classifies verbs into different categories to make them easier to conju￾gate. For example, if you know the conjugation of one verb, then you can conjugate many

verbs of the same type effortlessly because they follow the same pattern. Verbs are classi￾fied according to the endings of their infinitive. All French verb infinitives end in -er, -ir, -re,

or -oir. However, within those four categories are regular and irregular verbs. This chapter

focuses on the regular ones.

French has three groups of regular verbs:

Verbs whose infinitive ends in -er, like parler (to speak)

Verbs whose infinitive ends in -ir, like finir (to finish)

Verbs whose infinitive ends in -re, like vendre (to sell)

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