French Grammar Guide: Learn What Actually Matters

Look, if you're searching for a guide to basic French grammar, you're probably in one of two situations: either you're just starting out and freaking out about all the French grammar rules, or you've been studying for a while and still can't put together a decent sentence when you actually need to speak French.

Here's the thing about French grammar that nobody tells you upfront: the textbook approach is backwards. Most French courses dump 20 different verb tenses on you, expect you to memorize gender rules for 1,000 nouns, and make you conjugate subjunctive forms you'll barely use in real conversations. Then they wonder why you're still struggling.

So let's be honest about what you actually need to focus on, what can wait, and how to learn French grammar in a way that doesn't make you want to quit.

The Big Three French Grammar Rules You Can't Skip

1. French Nouns Are Either Masculine or Feminine (Yeah, It's Annoying)

Every French noun has a grammatical gender—either masculine or feminine. Not because it makes sense, but because that's just how the French language works. Le livre (the book) is masculine. La table (the table) is feminine. A table isn't inherently feminine. It's a table. But in French grammar, the gender of the noun determines everything else.

Why does this matter so much? Because the gender associated with the noun affects the articles (le vs la), the adjectives that agree with the noun, and sometimes even the verb forms. Get the gender wrong and everything cascades into wrongness.

The bad news: there's no perfect system for predicting gender. Nouns that end in certain letters follow patterns, but there are exceptions everywhere. The good news: you don't need to memorize rules. You need exposure. When you see la maison (the house) enough times in actual French content, your brain stops treating it as "house" and starts treating it as "la maison" as a complete unit.

2. French Verb Conjugation (Present Tense First)

Most French verbs fall into three categories based on their infinitive form: -ER verbs (like parler - to speak), -IR verbs (like finir - to finish), and -RE verbs (like vendre - to sell). Regular verbs in French follow predictable patterns once you know the conjugation rules for each group.

Here's how you conjugate parler in the present tense:

Notice how three of those sound exactly the same when you say them out loud? French does that a lot. The written forms are different, but the pronunciation is identical. This is actually helpful—you've got less to remember when you're trying to speak French.

The irregular verbs (être, avoir, aller, faire) don't follow the regular pattern, but you'll use them constantly. Don't let them intimidate you. You'll see je suis (I am) and j'ai (I have) so many times in real French that they'll stick without flashcards.

3. Two Past Tenses (Not Seventeen Different Tenses)

French technically has multiple past tenses. In practice, you need two: passé composé and imparfait.

Passé composé is one of the compound tenses for completed actions with a clear start and end. "I ate breakfast" = J'ai mangé le petit-déjeuner. It's built from a helper verb (avoir or être) plus a past participle.

Imparfait is for ongoing past actions or descriptions. "I was eating" = Je mangeais. "It was cold" = Il faisait froid.

Knowing when to use which tense comes from seeing them used, not from memorizing French grammar rules. When you watch a French show and someone says "Quand j'étais petit, je jouais au foot" (When I was little, I played soccer), you start to feel the pattern: ongoing background stuff gets imparfait, specific completed events get passé composé.

What You Can Skip (For Now)

The subjunctive mood? You'll eventually need it, but not while you're still trying to order coffee without panicking. The passé simple? It's a literary tense. You'll see it in books, but French speakers don't use it in conversation. The plus-que-parfait? Useful later, but you can communicate fine without it for a long time.

Focus on present tense, passé composé, imparfait, and simple future (futur simple). That covers about 90% of normal conversation when learning French.

The Problem With Traditional French Grammar Study

Here's what usually happens: you study a French grammar rule, do 20 fill-in-the-blank exercises, ace the quiz, and then completely blank when you're actually trying to speak. Why? Because your brain didn't learn grammar. It learned how to pass grammar tests.

French grammar exists to support communication. When you learn it in isolation—conjugation charts, out-of-context example sentences, grammar books—your brain files it under "school stuff" instead of "language ability." Then when you're in a real conversation, you can't access it fast enough.

The better approach? Learn French grammar through exposure to real français. Watch shows, read articles, listen to podcasts, and let the patterns sink in naturally. Then when you need to understand why something works a certain way, look up the French grammar rules. It sticks way better that way.

Essential French Grammar: Articles, Adjectives, and Pronouns

Articles That Change Everything

French has three types of articles, and they all change based on gender and whether you're talking about something specific or general:

Definite articles (le, la, les): "the" - for specific things Indefinite articles (un, une, des): "a/an" or "some" - for non-specific things
Partitive articles (du, de la, des): for quantities you can't count exactly

Example: Je veux du café (I want some coffee) vs Je veux le café (I want the specific coffee). The difference in meaning matters.

French Adjectives Must Agree in Gender and Number

French adjectives have to match the noun they are describing in both gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural). That means every adjective has four forms: masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine plural.

To make an adjective feminine, you usually add an -e to the masculine form. For plural forms, you add -s. So petit (small, masculine singular) becomes petite (feminine singular), petits (masculine plural), or petites (feminine plural).

Most French adjectives go after the noun. "A red car" = une voiture rouge. But common French adjectives—usually ones describing beauty, age, number, goodness, and size—go before the noun. "A small car" = une petite voiture.

This is one of those basic French grammar rules that feels weird at first but becomes automatic with exposure. When you hear French greetings and common French phrases enough times, you stop thinking about the rule and just say it right.

French Pronouns (Subject, Object, and Reflexive)

French has multiple types of pronouns used with nouns or in place of them. Subject pronouns (je, tu, il/elle, nous, vous, ils/elles) are the subject of the sentence. Direct object pronouns (me, te, le/la, nous, vous, les) replace the direct object. Indirect object pronouns (me, te, lui, nous, vous, leur) replace the indirect object.

Then you've got reflexive pronouns (me, te, se, nous, vous, se) used with reflexive verbs—verbs where the subject performs an action on itself. Like se laver (to wash oneself) or s'appeler (to call oneself, meaning "to be named").

Plus demonstrative pronouns, possessive pronouns, and the adverbial pronouns y and en. It's a lot.

The good news? In actual conversation, you mostly use a handful of these. Master the basics—subject pronouns and the most common object pronouns—and you can get past the beginner stage just fine. The rest will make sense once you've got the foundation down.

Word Order and Sentence Structure in French

Basic French sentence structure follows the same Subject-Verb-Object pattern as English. Je mange une pomme (I eat an apple) has the same word order as the English version.

But French word order gets interesting with pronouns, negatives, and questions. Object pronouns go before the verb: Je le vois (I see him), not Je vois le. Negatives wrap around the verb: Je ne parle pas (I don't speak). Questions can flip the verb and subject: Parlez-vous français? (Do you speak French?)

Like in English, you need to understand these patterns to build French sentences that make sense. The good news is that the basic sentence structure is familiar if you're coming from English.

Parts of Speech: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Adverbs

Understanding the different parts of speech helps you see how French grammar fits together.

Nouns are people, places, things, or ideas. In French, every noun has a grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and a number (singular or plural). The function in a sentence can be subject, object, or part of a prepositional phrase.

Verbs are action words that match the subject in person and number. You conjugate French verbs based on tense, mood, and the subject performing the action. Regular verbs follow predictable patterns. Irregular verbs... don't.

Adjectives describe nouns and must agree with the noun in gender and number. Most go after the noun, but some common ones go before.

Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They describe how, when, where, or to what degree something happens. Unlike adjectives, most adverbs don't change form—they stay the same for masculine or feminine, singular or plural.

Getting comfortable with these building blocks makes mastering French grammar way less overwhelming.

Tips to Help You Start Learning French Grammar

Stop trying to memorize conjugation tables. Seriously. That's not how your brain actually works when learning a language.

Instead, immerse yourself in comprehensible French content—stuff that's just slightly above your current level. Your brain is wired to pick up grammatical patterns from exposure. Kids don't learn their first language by studying grammar. They hear it, figure out the patterns subconsciously, and start using it.

You can do the same thing with basic French. Watch French shows with subtitles. Read French articles on topics you care about. Listen to French podcasts. When you see French verb conjugations hundreds of times in context, your brain builds the pattern automatically.

Then, when something confuses you—like "wait, why did they use est allé instead of a allé?"—that's when you look up the rule. Now it sticks, because you've already seen it used. You're just adding the explanation on top of the pattern you've already absorbed.

This is way more effective than the traditional approach of learning the rule first, then trying to apply it. Spaced repetition helps here too—reviewing French sentences at increasing intervals locks in both the grammar and the French vocabulary together.

The Real Secret: Context Matters More Than Rules

You know what's wild? Native French speakers make "grammatical mistakes" all the time in casual conversation. They drop the ne in negative sentences (je sais pas instead of je ne sais pas). They use on instead of nous for "we." They take shortcuts that would make a grammar book explode.

But they're still speaking perfectly valid, completely understandable French. Because French grammar rules describe how the language works—they don't define what's correct. Real French is messy and flexible and context-dependent.

So stop stressing about perfect grammar. Focus on being understood. The rules are there to help you achieve fluency, not to paralyze you. Make mistakes. Lots of them. That's literally how you improve when learning French.

If you're serious about learning French grammar instead of just studying it, you need to learn from real French content—not textbook examples designed to teach a single rule. That's where Migaku comes in.

The browser extension works with Netflix, YouTube, or whatever French content you want to watch or read. You see a French word or phrase you don't understand, you click it, you get the definition and add it to your spaced repetition deck—vocabulary and grammatical structures together. No switching between apps, no copying French sentences into a French dictionary manually, no breaking your immersion.

Here's why this matters for French grammar: when you learn je suis allé from an actual show, your brain remembers the context. You remember who said it, what was happening, how the verb was used. That sticks way better than a conjugation chart. Plus, you're seeing French grammar rules applied correctly in natural speech patterns, not artificial textbook sentences.

The mobile app lets you review your flashcards anywhere, with audio from native French speakers so you're learning pronunciation alongside grammar. And everything syncs across devices, so you can watch French shows on your laptop and review on your phone.

There's a 10-day free trial if you want to test it out. Way more effective than drilling verb conjugations in a workbook.