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French: The important -ir and -re verbs | ||
Tags: Verbs/Conjugation | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5522 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 19 07 September 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Or, How to pretend you know French irregular verbs with as little effort as possible
This data is based on Lexique's subtitle frequency data. For more information (including source code), see the this post in the French word frequency thread. And yes, since we're using subtitles, that means we're favoring spoken French over written French. We're also favoring dramatic situations over day-to-day life. French verbs fall into three general categories: * -er verbs: These are all completely regular, except for aller and a couple of rare slang forms. UPDATE: Oh, yeah. And some minor variations in certain stems. More on this later. * -ir verbs: Many of these are mostly regular, but lots of them have slightly unpredictable details to their conjugation. * -re verbs: These tend to be pretty irregular. Interestingly, in typical speech, all three groups appear more-or-less evenly, even though the total number of -er verbs is quite large: 
So from this graph, we could guess that there must be some very frequent -ir and -re verbs that make up the difference. If we're lucky, we might be able to make a short list that covered almost all the irregular verbs. Let's try another coverage plot, excluding aller: 
So it looks like a mere 20 or 40 verbs from each of the -ir and -re groups should give us excellent coverage of French irregular verbs. In fact, 20 verbs in each of these groups will give us better than 92% coverage, and 40 will give us better than 96%. And so we can build a short list of French irregular verbs that should give us excellent coverage of ordinary speech:
To give you an idea, if you master the conjugations of these verbs (plus the regular -er verbs), then out of every 150 words of typical spoken French, only 1 verb might give you conjugation trouble. That's sufficiently infrequent that you can just substitute an equivalent -er verb without getting caught. And of course, many of these verbs normally appear in only a handful of tenses. Of course, at lower levels, you might only want to learn the first 10 or 20 on each list. Edited by emk on 07 September 2014 at 9:42pm 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5420 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 2 of 19 08 September 2014 at 12:28am | IP Logged | ||
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A very good analysis that confirms what I have always thought: French verbs are not as complicated as many people
think. Two minor quibbles. 1. French movie subtitles are not very representative of ordinary spoken French. It is fabricated spoken French, as realistic as it seems. But the principles are the same. The big difference is probably the higher frequencies for the high-frequency words. Not a big deal. 2. The -ir verbs are actually two separate groups: the -ir and the -oir. The pronunciation is very different. It doesn't make an overall difference. It's just that the endings differ. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4999 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 19 08 September 2014 at 1:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Has anyone ever claimed otherwise? No offence meant (thanks for the analysis, I actually wondered about the number of necessary verbs some time ago), but I believe this is the base of every verb overview published. Tables with conjugations of the regular exemples and the most common irregular verbs +a few less common ones too different from the common exemples and the rest is in a neat list with notes pointing you to the table with a common verb with the same irregularity. I think you'll need to leave the "base zone" quite early in the intermediate stages though, but that is just my experience.
edit: Actually, you are right, sorry, many "mainstream" learners consider the French verbs difficult and I blame the classes and their usual approach. Things are being chopped into too small pieces, preventing the students from seeing the wider connections. It's not "hey, with these 40-45 verbs total, I can conjugate and say quite everything I need now and the irregularities aren't that unique and unpredictable for each verb", it's more like "no, three totally new verbs every week, it never ends". Those who are fed up and buy a verb book are usually nicely surprised by the new impressions. Yeah, and if the teachers stopped repeating all the time "this is complicated and difficult", that might help as well :-D Edited by Cavesa on 08 September 2014 at 1:11am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4280 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 4 of 19 08 September 2014 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
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The -ir verbs could also be further split into the "regular" non-iss ones and the
"irregular" -iss, i.e. «finissent», although many of the non-iss ones are already irregular in a way with their unpredictable peculiarities. Alternatively, a good, thorough, verb grammar workbook could help tremendously. I used a Practise Makes Perfect verb book several years ago, and the exercises helped. More complicated than Spanish verbs, but not impossible. Also, I once spent over a month on the literary tenses, and after revisiting them several times thence, those tenses like finir «qu'il finît», «que vous finissiez», «qu'elle vînt», «que vous vînssiez», if I spelt them correctly, are all seemingly even more complicated than any of their Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian counterparts in my experience, but since these tenses are almost eliminated in cuotidian discourse, the usage of less tenses seems to make the verbs actually simpler than one may be purported to believe. Edited by 1e4e6 on 08 September 2014 at 3:43am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5522 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 19 08 September 2014 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||
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As I mentioned in the original post, there are a few -er verbs with slight irregularities in their stems: Usually a single consonant that becomes double, or straightforward orthographic changes to keep the pronunciation of -c- or -g- from changing when it shouldn't.
So I grabbed the machine-readable conjugation tables from the French Verb Conjugation Rules project, and cross-referenced it against the entire Lexique database. This allows us to keep track of irregularities: verbs with oddball past participles, verbs with consonant tweaks, verbs which use être as an auxiliary, verbs with a weird passé simple, and so on. Each of these groups is called a "prototype" by the FVCR project. Here are the most important 25: 
Students of French will notice that some of these irregular verbs are actually quite easy—no worse than a strong verb like "swim/swam/swum" in English. But even taking all the complexities into account, we only need 60 prototypes to cover 99.3% of verbs in typical French subtitles: 
Again, this includes verbs which have an irregular stem in one tense, and plenty of other verbs where the irregularity can be described in a single sentence. This would actually make a pretty awesome Anki deck for upper-level students: Take the most important 60 prototypes, and include the shortest possible description of any irregularity. Done well, this would make C1 writing exams much less stressful. At the lower levels, the news is even better: You can get by with a surprisingly small number of irregular verbs. And you can learn a huge fraction of them by osmosis, if you actually get enough input.
Yeah, I think irregular verbs are often poorly taught in French classes. You can score very well on a B2 exam with a very small set of irregular verbs. Just nail a dozen high-frequency irregular verbs, pick up some oddball participles, learn about a few traps, use auxiliary verbs to avoid conjugating tricky forms, and blow off the rest. EDIT: Get your pretty version here. Or if you want all 154 verb prototypes as a spreadsheet, try here (though it may move in the future). As you can see, once you get past 90 prototypes or so, you're well into the verbs that everybody hates, including native speakers. But most of them are very easily avoided. Edited by emk on 08 September 2014 at 3:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4329 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 6 of 19 08 September 2014 at 4:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm so angry right now. When I got back into French about two years ago, I found an
amazing Anki deck that had maybe 80 or so archetypal verbs with all of their conjugations (don't remember the exact number). It would test a certain tense and you'd have to give an answer for each person. It was very thorough. Each verb hard cards for each tense (except some less-used subjunctive ones) conjugated for every person. Three months of reviewing that and I had very little difficulty conjugating verbs. I deleted it once I finished with it, and I no longer see it on the anki deck database! I'm sure people would find use in it, but I just can't find it right now! If anyone knows what I'm talking about, it would be great if they could share it so that everybody can take advantage of it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5197 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 19 08 September 2014 at 10:52am | IP Logged | ||
That's quite surprising to me, as I've found French verbs far easier than Spanish and Italian ones. I suspect it's because (1) awkward forms like the simple past and past subjunctive are no longer common so an active knowledge of them isn't needed, (2) the spoken forms have simplified a lot (for example parle, parles, parlent all sound the same), and (3) I did a lot of verb exercises in high school French, although even the forms that we didn't learn at school like the subjunctive were quite simple to pick up. So I suppose I agree with the original post that French verbs aren't as complicated as they're often made out to be. And I'm also inclined to agree with 1e4e6 on the utility of a good workbook... like I say I think the French verb exercises at school did help make them more automatic, and I've finally ordered a grammar workbook for Italian, a couple of years later than I should have! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5420 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 19 08 September 2014 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||
Now that I have a bit of time, I want to revisit something that I glossed over quickly earlier. It is true that if one looks at just the last two letters of the infinitive of French verbs, they fall into three groups, as stated above. But this is not how verb conjugation is taught in French. First of all, it is important to understand what a regular conjugation means. When the various verb forms can be easily derived from the infinitive, the verb is called regular. You look at the infinitive and you know how to conjugate the verb. There may be little spelling adjustments for phonetic reasons. Traditionally, French verbs are classified into three groups. 1. All the regular verbs ending in -er. This is the largest group of French verbs, and nearly all new verbs take this ending. 2. All the regular verbs ending in -ir. 3. All the irregular verbs ending in -er, -ir, -oir and the verbs ending in -re. This is a mixed bag, This is where the problems of conjugation lie. I should point out that the only irregular -er verb is aller. There are somewhere around 350 to 500 verbs in this last group depending on how obscure the verbs may be. But this is also where some of the most common verbs in French can be found, especially the top ten verbs. The interesting thing is that if you look at these so-called irregular verbs of the group 3, you will notice that there are actually a number of subgroups or sets of words that have similar conjugation. attendre, entendre, vendre, défendre are conjugated exactly alike. prendre, comprendre, reprendre conjugate identically because they have the same radical. venir, tenir and derived forms go together, except for the auxiliary in the passé composé. So, when you look at those so-called irregular verbs from this perspective, there are actually very few truly irregular verbs, i.e. where about the conjugation is unpredictable just by looking at the infinitive. This article says that there are only nine irregular verbs in French. Conjugaison en français The author notes that for the verb faire, the non-standard form vous faisez is becoming accepted as an alternative to vous faites. No word about vous disez that is still considered a big mistake. The importance of all this is that French so-called irregular verbs are not a huge mass of illogical forms to be learned by heart. There are around 9 patterns that you have to learn to derive all the conjugations. A much bigger and important problem, that's not the subject of this thread, is how to use them properly. Edited by s_allard on 08 September 2014 at 4:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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