French Verb Conjugation: The Stuff That Actually Matters (And What You Can Skip)

If you've tried learning French verbs from a textbook, you've probably seen those massive conjugation tables with like 18 different tenses and thought "there's no way I'm memorizing all this shit."

Here's the thing: you don't have to. Most of those tenses are for 19th-century novels, not for watching French Netflix or chatting with your Parisian friend.

So let's cut through the noise and focus on what actually helps you understand and use French.

The Real Problem with Learning French Verbs

The way most resources teach conjugation is backwards. They treat it like you're a French elementary school kid learning to write. But you're not—you already know how to conjugate verbs conceptually. You just need to map that knowledge onto French patterns.

A five-year-old French kid can conjugate parler perfectly in conversation. They'll say "tu parles" correctly every single time. When they start writing at school, they're shocked to discover there's a silent "s" at the end. It's all new information for them.

You're learning the exact opposite direction. If you spend hours writing out conjugation tables, you're learning to spell verb forms you don't even know how to say yet. That's why it feels so disconnected.

The Three Verb Groups (And Why They Matter)

French verbs split into three groups, and understanding this actually saves you a ton of time:

Group 1: -ER verbs (parler, chercher, étudier) This is 90% of French verbs. Once you nail this pattern, you've got the vast majority covered. The endings are: -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent. And here's what nobody tells you: je parle, tu parles, and il/elle parle all sound identical in speech. Different spellings, same pronunciation.

Group 2: -IR verbs (finir, choisir, réussir) About 300 verbs. The key marker: if the present participle ends in -issant, it's in this group. Endings: -is, -is, -it, -issons, -issez, -issent.

Group 3: Everything else This is where all the irregular verbs live. The ones you use constantly—être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir, vouloir. You can't escape these, so just accept you'll learn them one at a time through actual usage.

The Tenses You Actually Need

Forget learning all 21 verb tenses. You need maybe 6 for everyday French:

Present tense: Obviously essential. Use it for things happening now, habitual actions, and even some future stuff ("Je pars demain" = I'm leaving tomorrow).

Passé composé: Your main past tense. This is for completed actions—stuff that happened and is done. "J'ai mangé" (I ate). Form it with avoir or être in present + past participle.

Imparfait: The other past tense, but for ongoing or repeated past actions. "Je mangeais" (I was eating / I used to eat). Good news: it's ridiculously regular—only être is irregular in this tense.

Futur proche: Near future, formed with aller + infinitive. "Je vais manger" (I'm going to eat). Way more common in speech than the formal future tense.

Conditionnel: For "would" statements and polite requests. "Je voudrais un café" (I would like a coffee).

Subjonctif: Yeah, it exists. You'll see it after certain expressions like "il faut que" (it's necessary that). It's not as scary as everyone says—if you mess it up and use the present tense instead, French people won't judge you. You'll pick it up through practice.

The literary tenses (passé simple, plus-que-parfait, passé antérieur)? You need to recognize them when reading, but nobody uses them in conversation. Skip them until you're reading French novels.

Avoir vs. Être: The Auxiliary Drama

This trips up everyone. When forming compound tenses (like passé composé), you need either avoir or être as a helper verb. Here's the deal:

Most verbs use avoir. That's your default.

17 specific verbs use être. The mnemonic is DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP:

All reflexive verbs (the ones with se/s' in the infinitive) use être. Like "se lever" (to get up): "Je me suis levé(e)."

One more thing: when you use être, the past participle has to agree with the subject. So "Elle est allée" (she went) needs that extra -e for feminine. With avoir, you usually don't worry about agreement.

Why the Subjunctive Isn't Your Enemy

The subjunctive gets this reputation as the hardest part of French. But honestly, the Spanish subjunctive is way more complicated. French subjunctive follows pretty predictable patterns.

You use it after expressions of:

The key trigger: it almost always follows "que" (that).

Formation is straightforward for regular verbs: take the ils/elles present form, drop -ent, add -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent. The irregular ones (être, avoir, aller, faire) you just memorize through seeing them used.

If you're comparing it to Spanish subjunctive, French is actually easier because there are fewer irregular forms and the usage rules are more consistent.

What Actually Works for Learning This Stuff

Conjugation tables are useful as reference material. That's it. They're not a learning tool.

What works: seeing and hearing verbs in real context. A lot. When you're watching French content, you're not thinking "oh, that's the third-person plural imperfect subjunctive." You're just understanding what they said because you've heard that pattern before.

This is why the traditional textbook approach falls short—you're memorizing forms in isolation instead of building pattern recognition through exposure. It's the same problem we talked about in overcoming the beginner stage with any language.

The 20 most common French verbs cover the majority of everyday speech. Start there: être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, dire, savoir, venir. Once you can use these comfortably in different tenses, you're already functional.

For the rest? You pick them up as you go. See a verb used in a show, look it up if you need to, add it to your spaced repetition if it seems useful. Repeat. That's the process.

The French learners who get to fluency fastest aren't the ones who memorized every conjugation table. They're the ones who spent time with actual French content and gradually internalized the patterns.

How Migaku Handles the Verb Thing

When you're learning from real French content with Migaku—whether that's Netflix shows, YouTube videos, or whatever you're into—you see verbs in their natural habitat. Not in a table. In actual sentences where the context makes the meaning obvious.

The browser extension lets you instantly look up any verb form you don't recognize. Click it, see the conjugation, add it to your deck if you want. Then keep watching. You're not breaking your immersion to flip through a grammar book trying to figure out if that was imparfait or plus-que-parfait.

And here's what makes the difference: you're seeing the same verbs used over and over in different contexts. That's how you actually internalize conjugation patterns. Not by writing them out 50 times, but by hearing "j'ai fait" in 20 different episodes and your brain just… getting it.

The spaced repetition handles the memorization part. But the real learning happens when you're engaged with content you actually care about, noticing patterns naturally, building that intuitive sense of how French verbs work.

Give it a shot—there's a 10-day free trial if you want to see how learning from real content compares to grinding through conjugation exercises.