[Originally posted on 03/20/14 on the Duolingo French for English speakers forum by BastouXII]
With the goal of helping people learning French I’ve started, with a few other French natives and enthusiast seasoned learners, a compendium discussion to refer to other good discussions about French grammar, one tip at a time [EDIT: link was not archived on Duolinguists, but individual articles were].
I’ve also posted a few charts I’ve found all around the web as explanations to other people’s questions about specific grammar questions, as I find them most useful for my own language learning needs.
With all of that in mind, I thought it’d be a good idea to post a few charts with basic grammar knowledge in this discussion. Please upvote the ones you find most useful, so that people will see them first under here. Also, I will add more over time, so come back often and scroll to the bottom to see the new ones I added recently.
Selected comments on original post
Definite and indefinite articles. Here they are, separated by gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural).
What about it? You want to know why it’s not in this chart?
Simple answer, because it’s not an indefinite article.
Complete answer, du is the junction of de (a preposition) and le (which is in this chart). After verification, du is a partitive article that means “some”. See my reply for a grammar explanation and examples on how to use it correctly, along with de la, de l’, and des when the latter is used as a partitive article instead of an indefinite one.
I’ve found it : du is a partitive article. Here‘s a grammar explanation (in French). Here‘s a similar article, but in English.
Again an irregular (but important) verb : aller (to go) in the present of indicative tense.
Articles. The question of when to use de and du comes back every few days in the French discussions. So here’s a chart about different forms of article, including partitives (du, de la, de l’, des).
It’s easier to remember that :
- au = à + le
- aux = à + les
- du = de + le
- des = de + les
Do remember that, in a negative sentence, where you would have used the partitive (if it was positive), always use de, without definite article (never du / de la / de l’ / des) : “Je n’ai pas de pommes.“
French phonemes. These are all (I think) the sounds you need to know how to pronounce to speak French, with examples of words in which you can find them. Be careful : words taken from other languages, like English, may be pronounced differently by Frenchmen (most Quebeckers would pronounce them the same way an English speaker would). And some regions pronounce certain sounds or certain words differently.
I think it might be American, but I’m not sure it doesn’t apply, at least a little bit, to other accents.
Also, there are some mistakes, or inaccuracies, in it, even for American English and about France French. I’ve explained them in this discussion, which is where I got this chart from. To make it short, the 3 ‘a’ sounds should be separate because there are differences in the way they are pronounced, even if minimal. Same thing with the ‘e’ and ‘eu’ sounds.
Possessive articles. Notice that in French, unlike English, the possessives agree with the object being possessed, not with the owner!
Verb conjugations : second group. Verbs in French are divided in 3 groups.
- The first one, having the most verbs, contains almost all verbs ending in -ER. They all conjugate in the same way;
- The second group consists of verbs ending in -IR that make -ISSANT in the present participle (like finir), see below for the 2nd group chart;
- The third group is everything else.
Here’s the conjugation for the second group, always in the present of indicative tense.
Let’s start with the basics : the conjugation of the two most useful verbs of the French language : the auxiliaries être (to be) and avoir (to have) in the present of indicative tense.
No they don’t. “Ils/Elles sont” has a clear stop between subject and verb, and the “s” sound is “ss”. In “Ils/Elles ont”, the liaison makes the “s” sound like a “z”.
I wouldn’t say there is a clear stop between ils/elles and sont. In the part of France where I’m from at least…
In fact, colloquially the “l” is sometimes contracted out, so it ends up sounding [isson]/[esson] for être and [izon]/[ezon] for avoir.
The main clue here is [s] vs [z].
I meant it as you don’t pronounce both “s” (the one ending ils and elles and the one at the beginning of sont). It’s just the “s” from sont that’s pronounced. maybe I didn’t express myself clearly. I should have said : there is no liaison.
Verb conjugations : first group. Verbs in French are divided in 3 groups.
- The first one, having the most verbs, contains almost all verbs ending in -ER, but one or two exceptions (I’ve seen aller and some ending in -YER, like envoyer, essayer, payer as exception so far). They all conjugate in the same way. See below for the chart;
- The second group consists of verbs ending in -IR that make -ISSANT in the present participle (like finir);
- The third group is everything else.
Without further ado, here’s the chart for first group conjugations in the present of indicative tense :
Not a bad plan but I think that given the current structure of the forums it would simply get lost over time. It is probably better to store it in a place such as wikia (http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Category:French_for_English) or a similar resource.
Then it would be easily accessible and searchable.
I never intended to keep them in a chronological order. I think putting them in the order of usefulness to the most people is a good thing. I even mentioned it in the original post.
I know, we should probably put them there too. But there are still too many people unaware of the wiki and we created the list discussion for the purpose of keeping a reference to useful discussions as this one, provided people vote one of the two up (both reference the other, look in the first paragraph of this one) [EDIT: link was not archived on Duolinguists, but individual articles were].
Another irregular verb : faire (to do/to make), in the present of indicative tense. Pay attention to the 2nd plural person : vous faites, it’s the one people struggle with (most people will instinctively say or write vous faisez, which is terribly wrong ;-)).
Personal pronouns. There are different types of personal pronouns, they can change if they are subject, reflected, tonic (emphasized), direct object (COD) or indirect object (COI). Here’s the chart :
But it will be difficult for those not used to the french terms to decipher COI and COD. And their use need to be explained. But this chart sure is useful! 🙂
COD means complément d’objet direct (direct object complement)
COI means complément d’objet indirect (indirect object complement)
I believe the same concept of direct and indirect object exists in English. The information is also quite easy to find in many places online and in other Duo discussions. Here are two English pages explaining the French direct and indirect objects.
Edit : I added the definition of the acronyms. Hadn’t understood what you meant at first.
Verb conjugations : third group. Verbs in French are divided in 3 groups.
- The first one, having the most verbs, contains almost all verbs ending in -ER. They all conjugate in the same way.
- The second group consists of verbs ending in -IR that make -ISSANT in the present participle (like finir);
- The third group is everything else. See below for a chart of a few regular forms of verbs in this group;
Irregular first group verbs : essayer (to try) and envoyer (to send), in the present of indicative tense.
Duolinguists 