French Regular Verbs Fully Conjugated in all Forms

This book conjugates 21 regular French verbs in the affirmative, negative, interrogative, and negative-interrogative. Example: Present (il casse, 'he breaks') transitive verbPresent - Negative (il ne casse pas, 'he does not break') Present - Interrogative (casse-t-il? 'does he break?'), and Present - Negative Interrogative (ne casse-t-il pas? 'does he not break?'). Infinitives, Imperatives, Participles, and GerundivesPresentPresent Perfect (Compound Past) ImperfectPluperfectPast Definite (Simple Past) {a literary tense}Past Perfect (Past Anterior) {a literary tense}FutureFuture Perfect (Future Anterior) Present ConditionalPast ConditionalPresent SubjunctivePast SubjunctiveImperfect Subjunctive {a literary tense}Pluperfect Subjunctive {a literary tense}If there is a spelling difference because of the orthographic reforms, then both the traditional, or 'pre-1990' forms, will be shown along with the new. This book uses the notation of the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet, to show the pronunciation of French speech sounds. Now, the IPA is more popular in Europe and elsewhere overseas than it is in the United States. And this is a shame, because what the IPA does is show you exactly what the pronunciation is, and also how French speech sounds are produced--once you understand the significance of each of its symbols. For example, the speech sound written /eu/ in the word leur, meaning 'them, to them, their' is often transcribed in American books as something like 'luhr.' This kind of transcription actually is a very rough approximation of speech sounds in English, and not French. If you were to use this as a basis for your pronunciation of French, you would only speak it with a rough equivalent of its true pronunciation. It may be understood by a native French speaker, but it may grate on his or her ears, much like hearing a foreign speaker of English using 's' in place of the 'th' of 'think' or 'thin' "I sink you are correct."Now, this same word leur would be transcribed in IPA as [loe?], with the vowel being /oe/. And here's where a knowledge of the symbols used in the IPA can help. The sound /oe/ is a rounded version of the sound /?/. And the sound /?/ is the vowel in the American English words 'bet, ' 'set, ' and 'get.' As for 'rounding, ' it's the rounding of the lips when you produce certain vowels: for example, the vowel 'au' in the word 'caught, ' as opposed to the 'u' in the word 'hundred.' It may surprise you to learn that these two vowels are the same exact vowels, except that in the one, the 'au' of 'caught, ' the lips are rounded. Give it a try. Repeat the two words, noticing that they are produced in the same way by the placement of the tongue, with the addition of lip rounding for 'au.' These two words in IPA would be transcribed as [k??t] and [?h?nd??d], with the vowels themselves as /?/ and /?/. So, to produce the sound /oe/, simply say the sound /?/ as in 'bet, ' by itself, and then, without changing the position of the body of your tongue, round your lips as if you were saying the 'au' or 'aw' of 'caught' while you are doing so. There is a chapter designed to give the reader a working knowledge of the IPA, as applicable to French, along with explanations on how to accurately pronounce the French speech sounds that aren't present in English, by showing (as in the above), how to produce these sounds in relation to the (already known) sounds of English.