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French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
conditional (future-in-past) used in an apodosis when the protasis is contrary to fact (in the imperfect) used to describe a past event from the standpoint of an even-earlier event; mostly the same as in English, except that it is a simple (one-word) tense in French « Si je le savais, je te le dirais. » ("If I knew it, I would tell you.")
The simple (one-word) forms are commonly referred to as the present, the simple past or preterite [b] (past tense, perfective aspect), the imperfect [b] (past tense, imperfective aspect), the future, the conditional, [c] the present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive. However, the simple past is rarely used in informal French, and the ...
French verbs are conventionally divided into three groups. Various official and respectable French language sites explain this. The first two are the highly regular -er and -ir conjugations (conjugaisons) so defined to admit of almost no exceptions. The third group is simply all the remaining verbs and is as a result rich in patterns and ...
one who has emigrated for political reasons. French also use the word exilé (exiled) or réfugié (refugee) or even "exilé politique" or "réfugié politique". encore A request to repeat a performance, as in Encore!, lit. 'again'; also used to describe additional songs played at the end of a gig. Francophones would say « Une autre !
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
The passé composé is formed by the auxiliary verb, usually the avoir auxiliary, followed by the past participle.The construction is parallel to that of the present perfect (there is no difference in French between perfect and non-perfect forms - although there is an important difference in usage between the perfect tense and the imperfect tense).
Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form. In Spanish, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am