The rules: how French conjugation actually works
French conjugation looks vast and is mostly three tables. Every regular verb belongs to a family named for its infinitive ending, and each family shares one set of endings per tense:
| Family | Model | Present endings | Share of all verbs |
|---|---|---|---|
| -er | parler | -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent | roughly 90% |
| -ir | finir | -is, -is, -it, -issons, -issez, -issent | a few hundred |
| -re | vendre | -s, -s, (nothing), -ons, -ez, -ent | a shorter list |
Learn the -er endings once and you have covered roughly nine French verbs in ten, including almost every new verb the language coins. The -ir and -re families follow, and the full conjugation overview puts the system together.
The exceptions are the problem, and they are concentrated exactly where you cannot avoid them: être, avoir, aller and faire are the four most common verbs in French and all four are wildly irregular. The irregular verbs guide covers the patterns; the practical rule is to drill the irregular top 25 to reflex and let the regular families be regular. Avoir and être earn double attention because every compound tense runs through one of them - the avoir vs être guide is the one to read before touching the passé composé.
For the ranked list with translations, see the top 100 French verbs.
Flashcards, and what beats them for conjugation
The most searched-for tool here is French verb conjugation flashcards, and we will be straight with you: we do not ship a conjugation flashcard deck, because for this particular skill flashcards train the wrong direction. A card that shows "nous finissons" and asks what it means tests recognition; conversation demands the reverse - you have "finir", "nous" and a tense in mind, and the form has to arrive on its own. Practice that only runs one way builds a learner who reads well and freezes mid-sentence.
So our conjugation practice asks you to produce:
- The Conjugation Sprint - the game below.
- The practice box on every verb page, which prompts a person and tense and has you type the form.
Where flashcards genuinely shine is meanings, and for that the word drill runs proper spaced repetition (SM-2, the Anki algorithm), with the free Critical 100 open to everyone. Knowing what "atteindre" means is a flashcard job; producing "ils atteignirent" is not.
The conjugation game: Conjugation Sprint
The Conjugation Sprint gives you sixty seconds, one verb at a time: a person, a tense, four forms, tap the right one and the next question is waiting. Wrong answers flash the correct form and reset your streak. It is the closest thing to conversation pressure a practice tool can offer, and a round fits in the time a kettle takes.
The default round drills the present. The link also takes a tense list, so you can aim it at whatever you are studying:
- Imparfait only
- Futur simple only
- Subjonctif only
- Every tense at once - all six drillable tenses in a single round.
The Sprint is part of Kilo Lingo Plus; a new account's free week includes it and the rest of the games arcade.
Free practice on every verb page
All 437 French verb pages carry a practice box beneath the chart that asks for the forms rather than showing them - type the answer, get marked, keep going. No account, no clock unless you want the game. Open parler, être or any verb from the hub and scroll past the table.
The charts: 437 verbs, every tense
The French verb conjugation hub lists the 437 most common French verbs, each with a full chart: present, imparfait, passé simple, future, conditional, subjunctive and imperative, every person, with pronunciation and example sentences. Irregulars are flagged, because those are the pages worth opening first.
On the recurring PDF questions: there is no "1000 French verbs PDF" here, and we would gently suggest you do not want one - by verb five hundred the new arrivals are overwhelmingly regular -er verbs whose forms you can already generate. What we have instead is each verb's complete chart on a page that prints cleanly from the browser as an A4 PDF, a per-verb printable practice sheet (below), and the ranked top 100 for the list that actually repays printing.
Practice by tense
Each tense has a written guide with interactive exercises, printable worksheets in its downloads section, and where noted a Sprint link that drills it alone:
- Present: the -er, -ir and -re guides, plus the Sprint's default round.
- Passé composé: the guide and avoir vs être. Being a two-word tense, it gets its own exercises rather than Sprint rounds.
- Imparfait: the guide, then imparfait-only rounds, then the page that matters most: passé composé vs imparfait.
- Futur simple: the guide and future rounds.
- Conditionnel: the guide and conditional rounds.
- Commands: the imperative guide and command rounds.
- Subjonctif: how to form it, then subjunctive rounds.
Printable conjugation worksheets and PDFs
For paper practice:
- Per-verb conjugation worksheets. Every verb page has a printable practice sheet in its downloads section: a blank present-tense table for that verb with the answer key at the foot, so it works as practice first and reference after. Saved from the browser it is a clean A4 PDF. Start with parler or être.
- Grammar worksheet sets. Every tense guide above generates a printable worksheet set from its exercises, answer key included - see the imparfait guide's downloads section. The present-tense conjugation guides add a dedicated verb conjugation drill sheet on top.
- The full library. Every printable in the French course, mapped chapter by chapter: French teaching resources.
Downloading needs a free account: the first week includes unlimited downloads, and after that the printables are part of Kilo Lingo Plus. The guides, charts and on-page exercises stay free to read.
The wider worksheet collection - vocabulary, grammar and story sheets - is covered in free printable French worksheets for beginners. Learning Spanish too? The Spanish verb conjugation practice guide is this page's twin.