General Conjugation Rules for Regular French Verbs

Regular French verbs are usually divided into two main groups: verbs ending in -er and verbs ending in -ir. These two groups follow very similar patterns across most tenses, which makes them much easier to learn than irregular verbs.

These rules cover most regular verbs, although some verbs ending in -er do show special spelling or stem changes. If you’d like to explore those cases, you can click to check the related article here.

Let’s start with the passé composé.

The passé composé is formed using the present indicative of an auxiliary verb (either avoir or être) together with the past participle of the main verb. For regular verbs, the past participle is very predictable.

• For verbs ending in -er, replace -er with -é.
• For verbs ending in -ir, simply remove the final -r.

The Present tense follow a consistent pattern

With only a few exceptions (see the related article above for details), regular verbs follow a fairly consistent pattern in the present indicative.

• For verbs ending in -er, remove the -er ending to get the stem, and then add the appropriate endings depending on the grammatical person.

• For verbs ending in -ir, remove the final -r to form the stem, and then add the corresponding endings.

Stems derived from the present tense

Some tenses are built directly from the stems used in the present indicative. We mentioned this in a previous article, but it’s worth reviewing here.

• The imperfect tense is formed from the nous form of the present indicative, followed by the imperfect endings :

• The present subjunctive works slightly differently depending on the person.
  • For nous and vous, the conjugation uses the present indicative nous stem with the endings -ions and -iez.
  • For the other persons ( je, tu, il, ils ), the conjugation uses the present indicative ils stem with the endings -e, -es, -e, and -ent.

Use the infinitive form as the stem

The simple future and the present conditional are even more straightforward. In most cases, both tenses use the infinitive form of the verb as the stem, followed by different sets of endings.

• The simple future uses the endings -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, -ont.
• The present conditional uses the endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient.

You may notice that these endings are exactly the same as those used in the imperfect tense.

Of course, there are still a few exceptions. Some particularly unusual examples are envoyer. Its future stem is enverr-, which do not follow the usual pattern.

Spelling Changes of regular verb

There are also verbs whose stems change in ways similar to the spelling changes seen in the present indicative.

For example,

• some verbs change y to i, such as nettoyer and appuyer.
• Some verbs change e to è, such as mener and acheter.
• Others double the letters l or t, such as appeler and jeter.

You can find a more complete overview of these patterns in the article Irregularities within Regular Verbs.