French · Chapter 11 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer
The conditionnel
Future stem + imparfait endings. Same irregular stems as the future. Used for politeness (je voudrais, j'aimerais), hypothesis, and reported speech.
The short version
Je voudrais is the politeness layer
The conditionnel is what stops you sounding blunt in a French shop. Je veux un café is grammatical and brusque; je voudrais un café is what people actually say. Same move with pouvoir, where pouvez-vous becomes pourriez-vous, and with devoir, which turns must into should.
Pourriez-vous me dire où est la gare?
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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