-ER Present Tense

• In one line: learn one pattern here, and you can already use 9 out of every 10 French verbs. Every French verb has a basic dictionary form called the infinitive — this is the "to" form, like "to speak" or "to work" in English.
• Look at the last two letters of that dictionary form, and French verbs sort themselves into three families: -ER (parler = to speak), -IR (finir = to finish), and -RE (vendre = to sell).
• The -ER family is by far the biggest — roughly 9 out of every 10 French verbs belong to it.
• Even brand-new verbs that French invents today join this same family: googler (to google) and télétravailler (to work from home) both conjugate exactly like the verbs you're about to learn.
• So one pattern, learned once, lets you correctly use thousands of verbs — old and new.
• Nothing else you study at this level pays you back this much for so little effort.

• In one line: three simple steps turn any -ER verb into six correct forms. Step 1 — start from the infinitive, the dictionary form: parler (to speak).
• Step 2 — remove the letters -er from the end.
• What's left is the stem: parl-.
• The stem carries the meaning of the verb, and it never changes, no matter who is speaking.
• Step 3 — add the ending that matches the subject — the word for who is doing the action (je = I, tu = you, and so on).
• Follow these same three steps every time, and you'll never be stuck for a verb form.
• The table below builds all six forms of parler exactly this way, so you can watch the steps in action.

In one line: six little endings, and they never change from verb to verb. Here they are, lined up in one row, one column for each subject. Read across from left to right, and say each ending out loud as you go.

• These six endings are the same for every regular -ER verb you will ever meet.
• A regular verb is simply one that follows this standard pattern with no surprises — and almost every -ER verb is regular.
• So the recipe never changes: keep the same six endings, and just swap in a new stem for each new verb.
• That means each new -ER verb you learn costs you zero new grammar — only a new stem and a new meaning to remember.

• In one line: four of the six written forms sound exactly the same out loud. Say these four out loud, one after another: je parle, tu parles, il parle, ils parlent.
• Notice that all four come out sounding identical: just "parl".
• That's because the endings -e, -es, -ent are silent — you write them down on paper, but you never actually pronounce them.
• Only two forms out of six have an ending you can truly hear: nous (-ons, sounds like "on") and vous (-ez, sounds like "ay").
• Everything else is decided by spelling alone, not by sound.

• In one line: twelve useful verbs, one pattern you already know. Here are twelve of the most useful everyday -ER verbs.
• Every single one of them conjugates exactly like parler: chop off -er, then add the same six endings you just learned.
• So the only genuinely new thing to learn for each verb is its meaning — you already know how to build its forms.
• Read the je and nous columns out loud a few times, and notice the same pattern repeating in every row.

• • In one line: je drops its "e" and glues onto the verb whenever the verb starts with a vowel sound.
  • This little shrink has a name: elision — dropping a vowel letter and replacing it with an apostrophe, so two vowel sounds never bump into each other awkwardly.
• It happens whenever the verb right after je starts with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) or with a silent h — an "h" that you write but never pronounce, as in habiter.
• In that case, je becomes j' and joins straight onto the verb, with no space.
• You already built this exact reflex with j'ai back in Chapter 3 — French does this everywhere, because it keeps speech flowing smoothly instead of choppy.

• j'aime I like · j'habite I live · j'écoute I listen · j'étudie I study
• Never je aime, je habite — always j'aime, j'habite.

• In one line: a normally-silent "s" wakes up and sounds like "z" when the next word starts with a vowel. This word-linking has a name too: liaison — French joins neighbouring words together in speech so that everything flows without gaps.
• The final -s of nous, vous, ils, and elles is normally silent, as you already learned.
• But when the very next word starts with a vowel sound, that silent -s wakes up and is pronounced like a /z/, stitching the two words into one smooth sound.
• So nous aimons is never said as two separate chunks "noo… aimons" — it comes out as one piece, "noo-z-aimons".
• The table below shows exactly how each pronoun sounds once liaison kicks in.

• In one line: to say "not", wrap the verb in a two-piece sandwich — ne before it, pas after it. To make a French sentence negative — to say you don't do something — you don't just add one word like English "not".
• You add two small words: ne goes right before the verb, and pas goes right after it.
• The verb sits in the middle, like the filling inside a sandwich.
• Right before a vowel, ne shrinks down to n' — the exact same vowel-drop you just met with je → j'.
• One more small detail, shown in the last row of the table below: after a negative, the little words that mean "some" (du, de la, des) usually shrink down to a plain de.
• That's why de la viande (some meat) becomes pas de viande (not any meat) once you add the negative.

• In one line: French has three ways to ask a yes/no question — one easy, one standard, one formal. Way 1, the easiest — say a completely normal sentence and simply raise your voice at the end, exactly like English "You're coming?".
• Nothing about the words changes at all. Way 2, the standard one — put the fixed phrase est-ce que in front of the sentence.
• It's a ready-made question starter (pronounced "ess-kuh") that means roughly "is it that…", and it never changes form — the rest of the sentence after it stays exactly as it was.
• Way 3, the formal one — called inversion: you swap the verb and the subject and join them with a hyphen (tu parles becomes parles-tu).
• This last way sounds quite formal and shows up mostly in writing, not casual speech.
• In everyday conversation, ways 1 and 2 do almost all of the work, so lean on those first.

• One small sound fix to know: with il, elle, or on, plain inversion would put two vowel sounds right next to each other (parle-il) — awkward and hard to say smoothly.
• So French slips in an extra -t- between them, purely to make the phrase easier to pronounce: Parle-t-il ? Travaille-t-elle ? That extra -t- carries no meaning of its own at all — it exists only to keep the sound smooth.

• In one line: a handful of -ER verbs tweak their spelling slightly — but they still take the exact same six endings. A small number of -ER verbs adjust their stem a little in some forms.
• Why bother? Purely so the spelling keeps matching the way the word actually sounds — French doesn't like writing one thing and saying another.
• For example, manger (to eat) keeps its soft "j" sound in the nous form by adding an extra e: nous mangeons, never nous mangons.
• Nothing at all changes about the six endings themselves; only the stem gets a tiny spelling touch-up.
• For now, just skim the table below to recognise the six groups by sight — the full explanation and extra practice are waiting for you in the Exceptions tab.