Week 8, Day 1: Irregular Verbs That End with “–re” and Vocabulary About Nationalities Copy

Frederic

You are on to your final week of lessons! Hooray! In today’s lesson, we are going to learn about a couple of things:

• The group of verbs that end with “–dre”

• Vocabulary that will help you to talk about your nationality

For the second topic, unfortunately, it is not possible to list every nationality in this lesson, so do not take offense if you cannot find yours. We have tried to select a variety of commonly known and easily recognizable ones. If your nationality is not here, please get in touch with us to inquire about its French translation.

So, if you are ready, let’s begin with the first topic.

• Many important verbs in French belong to the group of irregular verbs with “–re” or “–dre” endings. Here are some examples below:

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Speaking Practice 1

Now, for the conjugation rules:

Listen to Week 8 Day 1 Track 2

Personal pronoun	Infinitive	Radical	Simple present tense
Je	vendre	vend	vends
Tu	vendre	vend	vends
Il / Elle	vendre	vend	vend
Nous	vendre	vend	vendons
Vous	vendre	vend	vendez
Ils / Elles	vendre	vend	vendent

• To make the past participle (for perfect tense), just add a “u” to the radical form:

Listen to Week 8 Day 1 Track 3

• vendre ➝ vend ➝ vendu

• There are few verbs that end with “dre” but do not follow this rule of conjugation; a notable example is prendre (to take). The conjugation of the verb “prendre” is given below:

Je prends

Tu prends

Il/Elle prend

Nous prenons (here we can see the difference)

Vous prenez

Ils/Elles prennent

• Past participle: prendre ➝ pris

Now, let’s listen to the dialogue and try to identify the verbs that you have just learned:

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Now, let’s move on to vocabulary related to nationalities. When you are traveling or talking to different people (online or in real life), you will find that these words will come in handy.

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Remember that when using a nationality as an adjective, it must match the number and gender of the noun it modifies. For example:

“Un Français” (a French person), but “Il est français” (he is French) and “il a la nationalité française” (he has French nationality – here, “française” is an adjective that modifies the feminine noun “nationalité,” so it has to take an “e”).

Speaking Practice 2

Read and listen to the dialogue below:

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A Quick Recap of this Lesson

Nationality is an important aspect of conversing with people from different parts of the world. In this lesson, we took a look at vocabulary related to different nationalities, as well as how to use them in conversations.
We also learned about the group of irregular verbs that end in "–re" or "–dre."
Rules to remember about this subgroup include the following:
a. To conjugate for the simple present tense, use the following suffixes and add to the verb’s radical form: (Je) –s, (tu) –s, (il/elle) no suffix added, (nous) –ons, (vous) –ez, and (ils/elles) –ent.
b. To conjugate to the past participle (for perfect tense), just add a "u" to the radical form. Example: Vendre ➝ Vend ➝ Vendu
c. A few irregular verbs that end in "–dre" are even more irregular than the rest of this subgroup. One example is prendre, which has its own conjugation rules.