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Aside from être and avoir (considered categories unto themselves), French verbs are traditionally [1] grouped into three conjugation classes (groupes): . The first conjugation class consists of all verbs with infinitives ending in -er, except for the irregular verb aller and (by some accounts) the irregular verbs envoyer and renvoyer; [2] the verbs in this conjugation, which together ...
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 ...
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
However, the simple past is rarely used in informal French, and the imperfect subjunctive is rarely used in modern French. Verbs in the finite moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and conditional) are also conjugated to agree with their subjects in person (first, second, or third) and number (singular or plural).
Conjugation is the variation in the endings of verbs (inflections) depending on the person (I, you, we, etc), tense (present, future, etc.) and mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, etc.). Most French verbs are regular and their inflections can be entirely determined by their infinitive form.
L'art de conjuguer also offers all of the rules concerning grammar within verb conjugation as well as a detailed guide on the purpose of each verb tense. The most recent versions cover 12,000 verbs in 95 conjugation tables. The second volume, L'orthographe pour tous (Spelling for All) explains how to convert spoken sounds in French into writing.
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 expressions that take the subjunctive in standard French take the indicative in Quebec French, or vice versa (bien qu'il est trop tard rather than bien qu'il soit trop tard). This is mostly colloquial spoken usage, since written usage tends to follow the usage of France more closely.