Looking up a French verb conjugation should take seconds. Whether you're checking an irregular passé composé form mid-draft or working through a full tense table for study, the way you interact with a conjugation reference determines how much you actually learn from each lookup — and how quickly the forms become automatic.
The Five Tenses to Prioritise First
French has more than fifteen tenses and moods, but exam writing at B1–C1 level draws predominantly from five. Build mastery here before working on the rest:
- Présent — the foundation every other tense stem often builds from
- Passé composé — narrating completed past events
- Imparfait — describing past states, habits, and backgrounds
- Futur simple — plans, predictions, and formal writing
- Conditionnel présent — polite requests and hypotheticals
For DELF B2 and DALF C1, add the subjonctif présent to this list. Once you're confident in these six, other tenses are refinements rather than foundations.
What to Notice When You Look Up a Verb
Most learners look up one form and move on. Each lookup is more valuable if you notice three things before closing the reference:
- The auxiliary verb it takes for compound tenses — être or avoir — since guessing wrong here is one of the most common exam errors.
- Whether the stem is regular or irregular relative to the infinitive — a regular stem means the pattern generalises to hundreds of other verbs; an irregular one needs to be flagged for active memorisation.
- Which family of verbs shares this same irregular pattern — so one lookup teaches you several verbs at once instead of just one.
How to Turn Each Lookup Into a Memory Opportunity
After looking up a verb form, write one sentence using it before you continue. Don't just note the form — produce it in context. This takes ten seconds and is significantly more effective at building recall than passive reading of tables.
For irregular verb stems, group them by family as you encounter them. Verbs that share a pattern can be learned together:
| Family | Verbs | Shared pattern |
|---|---|---|
| venir/tenir | venir, tenir, devenir, revenir, retenir, obtenir, maintenir | Present: je viens/tiens…; futur/conditionnel stem viendr-/tiendr- |
| prendre | prendre, apprendre, comprendre, surprendre | Identical irregular conjugation across the whole family |
| mettre | mettre, permettre, promettre, remettre | Identical irregular conjugation across the whole family |
| connaître | connaître, reconnaître, paraître, apparaître | Circumflex before -t in the il/elle form: il connaît |
| Futur/conditionnel doublers | pouvoir, vouloir, savoir, voir, envoyer | Irregular futur stems: pourr-, voudr-, saur-, verr-, enverr- |
Noticing these families turns each lookup into pattern recognition rather than isolated memorisation.
During a Timed Practice Session: Look Up or Write Around?
Looking up every uncertain form during a timed session breaks concentration and simulates the wrong exam conditions, since you won't have a lookup tool available in the real exam. Use a two-level rule:
Preply
Apprendre une langue avec un tuteur en ligne
- Quick confirmation (fine mid-session): you're 90% sure of the form and just want to confirm spelling or an accent — a glance under five seconds doesn't break your flow meaningfully.
- Genuine uncertainty (stop and write around it instead): you don't actually know the form. Rather than looking it up mid-draft, restructure your sentence around a verb or tense you're confident about, and note the gap for review after the session. This trains the exact skill the real exam demands — producing correct French without a reference.
Reserve full tense-table study for before and after practice sessions. The goal during a session is to write; the goal in a study session is to learn.
When to Build Your Own Conjugation Reference
As you practise writing, keep a running list of the irregular verbs you look up more than once. After three or four weeks of timed practice, this list becomes your personal priority study sheet — the specific gaps in your conjugation knowledge, not a generic list from a textbook. Reviewing it for ten minutes before your exam is significantly more targeted than revising a full verb table you already know.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I memorise conjugation tables by rote, or is lookup-based learning enough?
A hybrid works best: memorise the five to six core tenses for être, avoir, and the most frequent regular patterns by rote, and use lookups with the family-grouping technique above for everything else. Pure rote memorisation of every verb is inefficient; pure lookup without ever producing forms actively doesn't build exam-day recall.
How many irregular verb families should I actively track?
Most B1–B2 exam writing draws from six to eight high-frequency families (the ones in the table above cover most of them) — tracking more than that has diminishing returns compared to simply mastering these deeply.
Is it worth learning the passé simple or other literary tenses for exam writing?
Not for TCF, DELF, or DALF written production specifically — those tenses appear in literary reading texts but are not expected in your own writing at any standard exam level.
What's the fastest way to check whether I've actually memorised a form, versus just recognising it?
Cover the table and try to write the full conjugation from memory before checking. Recognising a correct form when you see it is a much weaker skill than producing it cold, and it's producing it cold that the exam actually tests.
A Conjugation Tool That Covers Every Verb and Every Tense
Use the French Verb Conjugator to look up any French verb across all tenses and moods in seconds. Type the infinitive, select the tense, and get the complete conjugation table — including which auxiliary the verb takes for compound tenses and the pattern family it belongs to.
For verbs you look up repeatedly, focus on internalising the stem rather than the individual forms. Once you know that voudr- is the futur/conditionnel stem of vouloir, all six forms in each tense follow from the standard endings without further memorisation.
