Giáo trình động từ tiếng Pháp - Part IV Looking Ahead: The Future and the Conditional Tenses -

Chapter 17

Could-ing and Would-ing with the

Present Conditional Tense

In This Chapter

Creating the conditional tense

Trying the conditional

You likely use the present conditional tense all the time, whether you realize it or not.

Perhaps you and your friends sit around and talk about not what you do (present

tense), did do (past tense), or will do (future tense) but about what you would do (condi￾tional tense). Examples in English include sentences like I would go out with him, We would

go to the movies if anything good were playing, You would tell her what you think, and They

would throw a great party.

So, the conditional is a mood that expresses a possibility, a supposition, or a wish. You also

use it to make polite requests or suggestions, as in Would you allow me to accompany you?

or I would choose the yellow dress. The conditional has two tenses: present and past. This

chapter concentrates on the present conditional; see Chapter 18 for more on the past condi￾tional. As you can tell from the examples, the conditional tense is translated as would in

English. (But don’t confuse the conditional tense with the imperfect tense that I talk about

in Chapter 11. The imperfect can express the would of the past, as in When I was young, I

would go fishing with my grandfather, meaning that I used to go fishing with my grandfather.)

At first, you may be able to get by without the present conditional in French. But this tense

makes you more polite, makes your writing more interesting, and spices up your conversa￾tion. Read through this chapter and master the ability to tell the world what you would do.

Forming the Conditional

The conditional tense allows you to express your opinions, likes, and dislikes more politely,

and to make suggestions without seeming too imposing. You may even call it the diplomatic

tense. Furthermore, you use the conditional tense in hypothetical sentences as in If it were

not raining, we would go to the beach.

You form the conditional by taking the infinitive of most verbs (the infinitive provides the

stem) and adding endings. If you read Chapter 15, you see that you form the future tense the

same way. The conditional and the future tenses share a stem, but the endings are different.

The endings of the future tense are derived from the verb avoir (to have), whereas the end￾ings for the conditional match the endings for the imperfect tense (see the following table).

The conditional tense is a composite of the future and the imperfect; it has the same stem

as the future tense and the endings of the imperfect tense. (If you need more information on

the future tense, see Chapter 15; for details on the imperfect tense, see Chapter 11.)

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