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French: The important -ir and -re verbs

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luke
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 Message 17 of 19
13 September 2014 at 1:14am | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
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.


To tie in emk's verb form spreadsheet with FSI Basic French... FSI Basic French has 24 lessons. The course is basically divided into 4 quarters. Each quarter ends with a review of the previous 5 lessons. If we ignore the 4 review lessons, we can think of the course having 20 lessons. That will make the percentage math simpler. Each lesson represents 5% of the course.


The first quarter of FSI Basic French aligns perfectly with emk's analysis. It covers the top 4 irregular verbs as well as regular er verbs.

%FSI %emk verb coverage
25%   67.65%

The second quarter of Basic French gets the next 5 most frequent verb forms and 3 others.

50%   82.5%

The third quarter covers about 5% more verbs. They've covered the top 16 verb forms.

75%   89%

They cover 2 more verb forms in the last quarter of the course. They spend most of their time on the subjunctive.

100% 90%



Edited by luke on 13 September 2014 at 1:15am

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emk
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 Message 18 of 19
15 September 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged 
Thank you for the information on FSI Basic French. It sounds like they're really following the frequency distributions pretty closely, then.

I had a few spare moments while travelling this weekend, and I made the following chart which was inspired by the Wikipedia article s_allard linked to:



This is the basic, underlying system of French verb conjugation. There are genuinely irregular verbs, of course, but everything else can be shoe-horned into this table somehow.

At some point, when I'm less busy, I want to turn all this into a concise guide to French verbs.
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emk
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 Message 19 of 19
15 September 2014 at 8:41pm | IP Logged 
And for those who prefer a more concrete example, here's boire:



It's actually pretty tricky to find a verb which shows off the full flexibility of this system. Most verbs combine singular+stressed or unstressed+stressed. But boire and the tenir/venir group work well. But the latter group also has a tricky "simple past" stems, so it makes a poor example.


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