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Handling irregularities in French

  Tags: Morphology | French
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liams
Bilingual Triglot
Newbie
Israel
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Speaks: English*, Modern Hebrew*, Russian
Studies: French

 
 Message 1 of 12
15 December 2012 at 1:31am | IP Logged 
I decided to take on French, knowing that it's going to be difficult because it has a lot of irregularities. But I did not expect that many! For each conjugation rule, you have dozens of irregular verbs! How do you tackle this issue? Is the only method really just memorizing them? And why is French so riddled with irregularities?
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emk
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 Message 2 of 12
15 December 2012 at 2:45am | IP Logged 
liams wrote:
I decided to take on French, knowing that it's going to be difficult because it has a lot of irregularities. But I did not expect that many! For each conjugation rule, you have dozens of irregular verbs! How do you tackle this issue? Is the only method really just memorizing them? And why is French so riddled with irregularities?


It's not nearly as bad as it looks, and you don't actually need to memorize all those verbs right now, unless you have a sadistic teacher. :-)

The irregular verbs fall into several categories:

Really common irregular verbs. These include être, faire, aller, vouloir, pouvoir, venir, prendre, tenir and so on. You'll see these verbs dozens of times per page, and even if you make no particular effort to memorize the conjugation tables, you'll know them by heart by the time you can carry on a conversation in French, just like you can conjugate "to be" in English.

Verbs which are basically prefixes stuck on a really common irregular verb. Apprendre, comprendre, devenir, etc., all work like the corresponding irregular verb.

Verbs which are almost entirely regular, and which you can let your spell-checker fix until you learn them. Things like acheter, which picks up an extra accent in some forms.

Irregular verbs that you can mostly avoid. It's easy to avoid croître. And even the French forget how to conjugate coudre. Seriously, every French speaker I know owns a big book of irregular verb tables, just in case they ever get confused by a rare verb.

If you use a French course that includes lots of written and spoken input, the important irregular verbs will mostly sort themselves out without tons of brute-force memorization. You'll have to do some mop-up work here and there, and you'll be doing Google searches for conjugation tables for a while, but it's not nearly so horrible as it seems right now.

Edited by emk on 15 December 2012 at 2:48am
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liams
Bilingual Triglot
Newbie
Israel
Joined 4445 days ago
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Speaks: English*, Modern Hebrew*, Russian
Studies: French

 
 Message 3 of 12
15 December 2012 at 3:19am | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
liams wrote:
I decided to take on French, knowing that it's going to be difficult because it has a lot of irregularities. But I did not expect that many! For each conjugation rule, you have dozens of irregular verbs! How do you tackle this issue? Is the only method really just memorizing them? And why is French so riddled with irregularities?


It's not nearly as bad as it looks, and you don't actually need to memorize all those verbs right now, unless you have a sadistic teacher. :-)

The irregular verbs fall into several categories:

Really common irregular verbs. These include être, faire, aller, vouloir, pouvoir, venir, prendre, tenir and so on. You'll see these verbs dozens of times per page, and even if you make no particular effort to memorize the conjugation tables, you'll know them by heart by the time you can carry on a conversation in French, just like you can conjugate "to be" in English.

Verbs which are basically prefixes stuck on a really common irregular verb. Apprendre, comprendre, devenir, etc., all work like the corresponding irregular verb.

Verbs which are almost entirely regular, and which you can let your spell-checker fix until you learn them. Things like acheter, which picks up an extra accent in some forms.

Irregular verbs that you can mostly avoid. It's easy to avoid croître. And even the French forget how to conjugate coudre. Seriously, every French speaker I know owns a big book of irregular verb tables, just in case they ever get confused by a rare verb.

If you use a French course that includes lots of written and spoken input, the important irregular verbs will mostly sort themselves out without tons of brute-force memorization. You'll have to do some mop-up work here and there, and you'll be doing Google searches for conjugation tables for a while, but it's not nearly so horrible as it seems right now.


Thank you for your answer!

I will try to put the irregulars aside until I have to use them, and by then I assume some of them I will already know by heart. I found a great website that has a French grammar guide, along with exercises. I'll share it so others could enjoy it as well:
http://www.languageguide.org/french/grammar/
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Iversen
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 Message 4 of 12
15 December 2012 at 11:48am | IP Logged 
The problem in French is of course that many endings in the pronunciation have been reduced to nothing at all, but you need to know them when you write (the reason for this sad situation is of course that the orthography of French was 'frozen' in the 1600s, and it was oldfashioned even then). And like other languages French has also its share of irregular verbs (but luckily most are just irregular, not totally chaotic like "être"). So to pick these irregularities up from the things you read you have as a minimum to spend some time on reading with extreme attention to the endings - even at the price of caring less about the content.

Rote memorization of tables will not be appealing for most learners, but in small doses it isn't a bad idea - especially if you use a technique with one or more repetition phases just as with wordlists. The one thing I wouldn't recommend is trying to memorize just by reading - I find that both tiring and inefficient because you have to keep everything in your head at the same time. Write the things you want to remember down and subdivide them in small and manageable packets.

One general advice would be always to keep a reference to the irregular verbs ready so that you can get any doubt solved within seconds. In the old days there was something called Le Petit Bescherelle, and there is also an online version of it. Besides there are sites like www.verbix.com, but there you have to know the infinitive of a verb. It will be most efficient to make a list yourself based on one of these sources because the writing process in itself is part of the learning. But just getting any question solved ASAP is much better than waiting for hours and maybe forgetting the question - and if that means using a source compiled by others then that's what you should do.


Edited by Iversen on 16 December 2012 at 12:27pm
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tractor
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Norway
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 Message 5 of 12
15 December 2012 at 12:24pm | IP Logged 
Get the little Bescherelle book Iversen mentioned. It has been published under several titles, among them Le
nouveau Bescherelle: L'art de conjuger: Dictionnaire de 12000 verbes and Bescherelle: La conjugaison pour
tous.
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liams
Bilingual Triglot
Newbie
Israel
Joined 4445 days ago
11 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: English*, Modern Hebrew*, Russian
Studies: French

 
 Message 6 of 12
15 December 2012 at 3:04pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
The problem in French is of course that many endings in the pronunciation has been reduced to nothing at all, but you need to know them when you write (the reason for this sad situation is of course that the orthography of French was 'frozen' in the 1600s, and it was oldfashioned even then). And like other languages French has also its share of irregular verbs (but luckily most are just irregular, not totally chaotic like "être"). So to pick these irregularities up from the things you read you have as a minimum to spend some time on reading with extreme attention to the endings - even at the price of caring less about the content.

Rote memorization of tables will not be appealing for most learners, but in small doses it isn't a bad idea - especially if you use a technique with one or more repetition phases just as with wordlists. The one thing I wouldn't recommend is trying to memorize just by reading - I find that both tiring and inefficient because you have to keep everything in your head at the same time. Write the things you want to remember down and subdivide them in small and manageable packets.

One generel advice would be always to keep a reference to the irregular verbs ready so that you can get any doubt solved within seconds. In the old days there was something called Le Petit Bescherelle, and there is also an online version of it. Besides there are sites like www.verbix.com, but there you have to know the infinitive of a verb. It will be most efficient to make a list yourself based on one of these sources because the writing process in itself is part of the learning. But just getting any question solved ASAP is much better than waiting for hours and maybe forgetting the question - and if that means using a source compiled by others then that's what you should do.


Thanks! I'll try to look at the tables every day for a few minutes. I usually memorize things that way pretty fast so it should be a decent method.
I've also downloaded an Anki deck that teaches irregular verb conjugations, and I will review it daily.

Right now my French is 95% passive. It's easy for me to read in French, and I often understand a lot, but I can't speak or write at all. That's what happens when you study French for 2.5 years in school and you don't use it for years afterwards, I guess.
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LaughingChimp
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Czech Republic
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 Message 7 of 12
15 December 2012 at 7:26pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:

One generel advice would be always to keep a reference to the irregular verbs ready so that you can get any doubt solved within seconds. In the old days there was something called Le Petit Bescherelle, and there is also an online version of it. Besides there are sites like www.verbix.com, but there you have to know the infinitive of a verb.


The French Wiktionary has conjugation tables for all verbs and it will point you to the infinitive if you search for a conjugated form.
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Jeffers
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Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

 
 Message 8 of 12
15 December 2012 at 7:38pm | IP Logged 
The Verb Cast is a relatively painless way to learn or review French verb conjugations. There are 20 free podcasts of about 20 minutes each. Many members of these forums won't like the slow pace of the podcasts, because they are based around the ideas of relaxation techniques and visualisation. But I think they're pretty good. I've only listened to the first 5 episodes, because I'm saving the others for revision rather than learning, so I'll listen to them once I've finished with Assimil. But now that I've mentioned it... maybe I'll listen to a few more!

If you want to look into a commercial product, Living Language had an old audio series called In-Tense French/German/etc.   These are geared towards advanced beginners, but they cover verbs from the present tense on up. They give each part of the conjugation followed by an example in a sentence. This is then followed by a dialogue, and then some audio exercises. I think it's quite good, and there is nothing else like it. Unfortunately, these came out on cassette only, and they've never released a digital version. Used copies are available for a pretty reasonable price on Amazon (search for Living Language In Tense French).


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