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French: The important -ir and -re verbs | ||
Tags: Verbs/Conjugation | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3832 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 19 08 September 2014 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
The french children spend a lot of time at school learning the regular sub-groups of the verbs of the 3rd group, and little mental tricks to remplace one by another to check if the conjugation is correct or not. The regular 2nd group contains all the -ir verbs having the first plural person in -issons: finir-> nous finissons: 2nd group. Ouvrir: nous ouvrons->3rd group. I think nonetheless that "vous faisez" is still considered as a "barbarisme" and should be avoided. BTW: "finir" and "réfléchir" are regular verbs of the 2nd group Edited by Arnaud25 on 08 September 2014 at 8:08pm 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 10 of 19 09 September 2014 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for this link. The author's model of French verbs is really quite brilliant, though it overlooks a handful of minor irregularities. I used this model to update my analysis, with occasional reference to this article that tries to group verbs by how their principal parts vary. French irregular verbs: Reaching 98% text coverage For my working notes, see my speadsheet of verb prototype frequencies with notes. Up through 98% coverage, these notes are based on a rigorous, systematic validation of the actual verb forms using software. Stuff you need to learn for real: Regular verb groups: -er, -ir, -re. 7 true irregulars: être, avoir, aller, pouvoir, vouloir, savoir, devoir. 3 irregular forms: Vous dites, il plaît, il connaît. 1 defective verb: falloir only exists in a handful of forms. When to use the 7 principal parts: Infinitive, past participle, singular, atonic, tonic, future, passé simple. Some sound laws: Handle ge, ç, d/t + t when applying suffixes. After that, you only need to learn the principal parts: Insanely messy: asseoir (seriously, no wonder I can never get this right). Fairly complicated: voir, tenir/venir, boire, mourir, plaire. Doubling consonants: appeler/jeter. Groups with random e weirdness: espérer, amener. The -ire variations: lire, conduire, écrire. Groups with minor tweaks: suivre, croire, mettre, dormir/partir/mentir/sentir/servir, ouvrir/offrir, vivre, envoyer, foutre. The verb foutre is actually part of a larger group with vendre/rompre/vaincre/foutre that I haven't finished analyzing yet. There are another 35 prototypes or so that look useful but which I haven't analyzed yet. (They look like they're almost entire principal part variations). If those are included, we would reach 99.9% verb coverage in the film corpus. If we finished this analysis, I think it could be used to build a really amazing Anki verb deck, with coverage up through "well-educated native with a copy of Bescherelle" levels. 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 11 of 19 09 September 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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By the way, if you're interested in seeing the underlying conjugation models, I've put some source code on GitHub. I added a few verbs over lunch, reaching 99.9% text coverage with only 11 irregular verbs and 4 "defective" ones.
The code is very declarative:
If anybody is working on a guide to French verbs, this code can be used to very rigorously analyze what sub-groups exist, and how they relate to each other. And by refactoring the code, you can attempt to simplify the underlying model. Everything gets verified against an existing public domain database of French verb prototypes, as mentioned on the first page of this thread, and any incorrect changes to the model will result in an error. One interesting takeaway from this work: Thanks to massive exposure to actual French, I already know a surprising fraction of these irregular verbs without ever having consciously learned them. As usual, this suggests that exposure and study are two great tools that work much better together. Edited by emk on 09 September 2014 at 9:18pm 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 12 of 19 11 September 2014 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Getting to 99.9% irregular verb coverage
I keep hacking at this in my spare time, and I'm continually amazed at how simple the French verb system really is. Let me walk you through this. First, we're going to set aside some irregular and defective verbs:
If we assume that these must be learned by heart, then we can 99.9% coverage of verbs in French films with only 49 additional rules of the form:
…and so on. This list was generated by a program and verified against a database of French verbs. Of course, this list assumes that you know about the various principal parts of French verbs, and when to use them. And also that you know how to insert ge and ç to preserve sounds, and to drop -t after d and t. And you need to know which verbs fall into which category. Interestingly, the -ir verbs break into two categories: a large group of verbs which take -iss in their atonic and tonic radicals, and smaller group which doesn't. The former group is almost entirely regular, with two minor exceptions. The latter group, interestingly, has no regular pattern: every single verb which I've seen so far has at least one small irregularity. When I have some time, I'll turn this into a spreadsheet or a website or something. But in the meantime, take heart: French verbs are a lot simpler than they look! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4899 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 13 of 19 11 September 2014 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't really struggled with French verbs, but one of the things I hated about Assimil NFWE was that it didn't say much when it introduced a new verb. It would give a rundown of the forms, and pretty much leave you to it. I would have liked more comments such as: "this verb is regular except for x, y or z forms", and so on. A bit more of the big picture would have given me more basis for assimilation.
1 person has 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 14 of 19 11 September 2014 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yeah, for people who like having a big picture, I recommend supplementing Assimil NFWE with Dover's Essential French Grammar. It's usually only $2 or so, and covers all the essentials.
Anyway, my spreadsheet is now ready: French verb conjugations in 63 rows This shows how you can reach 99.9% coverage of verbs in French films with only 63 verb forms, and it includes detailed notes for everything except the truly irregular verbs. Here's what the coverage looks like: 
If you combine the spreadsheet with the excellent explanation of principal parts that s_allard posted earlier, you should be in very good shape. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4899 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 15 of 19 11 September 2014 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That is a very impressive spreadsheet, emk, thank you for putting it all together! So it looks like knowing the regular -er verbs, plus être, avoir and aller cover about 2/3 of verb usage. It would be nice to see a pie chart like you made on your first post, but which also had separate slices for être and avoir (just for curiosity).
I'm not fully sure how I will use the spreadsheet, but I am certain that it will be useful. I'd love to hear what you, and other readers, think you can do with the list. (And if anyone knows how to find the Anki deck Sizen mentioned, that would be great too!) 1 person has 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 16 of 19 12 September 2014 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The reason être, avoir and aller are so frequent, as to make up around 30-40% of all verbs in spoken French, is that
they are the key auxiliary verbs for the passé composé and the futur proche tenses in addition to other common uses. For example, the common question forms Est-ce que, Qu'est-ce que, Quand est-ce que, etc. have an embedded être form that often goes unnoticed. What this all means actually is that conversations in French tend to use a small number of verbs over and over again. I hardly need to say that around 100 active French verbs are probably all you are likely to use in everyday speech. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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