The Conditional tense expresses the idea that you WOULD do something, if a specific condition is met. So in English, it involves either the word “would” or its abbreviation “‘d” (apostrophe d). If we take the English verb “to give,” its conditional would be “I would give” or “I’d give.” The conditional of the English…
The Imperfect verb tense (l’imparfait) in French is used to express continuous action in the past. If we use the English verb “to give” as an example, the meanings of the French Imperfect version of this verb would be “I was giving,” “I used to give,” “I kept on giving,” or even “I gave.” There…
The Future Simple tense of regular verbs was covered in a previous post here. That post explained how to find the future simple stem of a regular -er, -ir or -re verb, as well as the appropriate future simple endings. This post, however, is a list of the most important verbs whose future simple stems…
The French verb tense called the Recent Past (or Passé Récent in French) is a way to talk about things that have happened in the past, but quite recently. It translates in English as “to have just (done something).” It is very easy to use because it doesn’t use an actual past tense, so it doesn’t…
The Near Future tense, known as “Le Futur Proche” in French, is one of the easiest ways to talk about the future. If we take the English verb “to give,” an example of the Near Future would be “I am going to give.” The idea is that the action will happen fairly soon. Hence the…
The present tense in French covers three different tenses in English. If you take the verb “to speak,” the French present tense covers these three meanings: Regular -er verbs endings Regular -er verbs conjugation example: Parler – to speak Donner – to give Regular -ir verbs Regular -ir verb endings: Regular -ir verbs conjugation example…
The future simple (“le futur simple” in French) is a verb tense that enables you to talk about things that will happen in the future. In English, it corresponds to usages such as “I will” (do something), “I’ll” (do something), “I will not” (do something) or “I won’t” (do something). To conjugate a verb in…
French noun gender is a way of categorising all nouns (naming words) in the French language into either the masculine category or the feminine category. English used to have noun genders but they have all been lost, with the exception of ships being traditionally regarded as feminine, as in the phrase, “Bless her and all…
Do you feel like the little girl in this meme? Never knowing the gender of a noun in French? There is in fact a logical reason for the gender of a washing machine in French. A washing machine is a “lave-linge” in French. That word is made up of two individual words: “lave” which comes…