French verb conjugation: 150 verbs in every tense (free PDF download)

French conjugation is the part of the language that trips up most English speakers, and it is also the part that rewards practice the fastest. This page gathers the 150 most useful French verbs in every tense, each with a clean table, its English meaning, example sentences and a free PDF you can print.

Why French conjugation is hard for English speakers

English verbs hardly change: I speak, you speak, we speak, with a single extra -s for he speaks. A French verb changes for every person, so one tense means six forms to learn, and there are more than a dozen tenses and moods. Many of those forms sound identical (je parle, tu parles, ils parlent), which makes spelling the real difficulty. English also has a single simple past, whereas French has to choose between the passé composé and the imparfait. Finally, the subjunctive has almost disappeared from everyday English, but French uses it constantly after expressions such as il faut que.

The three groups of French verbs

Every verb belongs to one of three groups. The 1st group is made of verbs in -er such as parler (to speak); it is by far the biggest group and it is regular. The 2nd group contains verbs in -ir that form their present participle in -issant, such as finir (to finish). The 3rd group gathers everything else, including aller (to go), the -re verbs and the -oir verbs. Once you know which group a verb is in, you know which pattern of endings to apply. The 3rd group is where you need to learn the stems one by one.

Être or avoir? Choosing the auxiliary

Compound tenses such as the passé composé are built from an auxiliary plus a past participle: j’ai mangé (I ate), je suis allé (I went). Most verbs, including avoir itself, take avoir. A small group of verbs of movement and change (aller, venir, arriver, partir, entrer, tomber, naître, mourir) and all reflexive verbs take être. With être the participle agrees with the subject: elle est allée, ils sont partis. Each verb page on this site states clearly which auxiliary the verb takes. The verb être is the most frequent verb in French and the first one to learn.

How to use these conjugation tables

1. Search for the verb above, or pick it from the A to Z list. You can type the infinitive, a conjugated form such as nous mangions, or the English meaning.
2. Open the verb page and read the present tense out loud, using the listen button if your browser supports it.
3. Look at the endings in bold. They are the part you need to memorize; the stem is shown in plain type.
4. Cover the table and write the forms from memory, then check yourself.
5. Print the PDF chart and keep it in your binder for quick review before a test.

Which tenses to learn first

Do not try to learn all the tenses at once. Start with the présent, then the passé composé and the imparfait so that you can talk about the past. Add the futur simple and the conditionnel présent next. After that, work on the subjonctif présent and the impératif. The literary tenses (passé simple, passé antérieur and the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive) appear mostly in novels and history books, so you can recognize them for reading without producing them. The 150 verbs are sorted by frequency, which means the verbs at the top of the list are the best investment of your study time.