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The verb forms of French are the finite forms which are combinations of grammatical moods in various tenses and the non-finite forms. The moods are: indicative (indicatif), subjunctive (subjonctif), conditional (conditionnel) and imperative (impératif).
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 ...
This subject-verb inversion is similar to question formation in English, though in English the inversion may only occur with auxiliary verbs, while in French it may occur with all verbs. If the subject is anything other than an unstressed pronoun, an unstressed subject pronoun that agrees with the subject is added to the right of the verb.
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).
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 use of the participle mood (at present tense, inherited from the Latin gerundive) has almost completely fallen out of use in modern French for denoting the continuous aspect of verbs, but remains used for other aspects like simultaneity or causality, and this participle mood also competes with the infinitive mood (seen as a form of ...
Even though the passé simple is a common French verb tense, used even in books for very young French children, it is usually not taught to foreigners until advanced French classes. The passé simple is most often formed by dropping the last two letters off the infinitive form of the verb and adding the appropriate ending.