French grammar

French grammar is the rules about how to speak and write the French language. It is similar to the grammar of other Romance languages.

French is moderately inflected. This means that some words change their form in different situations.

Verb

In French, verbs are conjugated to show information. That means they change endings.

Person

Verbs are conjugated to match with grammatical person.

Irregular Verbs

Most French verbs are regular, which means that the someone can guess how to conjugate a verb based on what letters a verb ends with. However, some verbs are irregular. Irregular verbs do not follow the normal pattern of conjugation. Instead, the forms must be learned differently. An example of an irregular verb in French is être (to be).

Noun

Gender

Every French noun has a gender. A noun can be either masculine or feminine.

Number

The plural of a noun usually ends with -s. For example, dog (chien) becomes dogs (chiens). However, if a noun ends in -au, -eu, or -ou, it can have -x at the end as a plural. For example, game (jeu) becomes games (jeux). If a noun already ends with -s, -x, or -z, it does not change in the plural.

Adjectives

In French, adjectives change in order to agree with the gender and number of the noun it describes.

Word order

The word order in French is subject-verb-object. In the sentence Je mange le gâteau (I eat the cake), je (I) is the subject and le gâteau (the cake) is the object. However, if the object is a pronoun, it goes before the verb. If le gâteau is replaced by le (it), the sentence becomes Je le mange (I eat it).