Before you start

Conjugating is not a matter of understanding. Almost everyone who hesitates over an ending can explain the rule perfectly well: they know that the verb agrees with its subject, they know that the futur is built on the infinitive, they know that the passé composé is made with an auxiliary. What they lack is not the rule, it is speed. At the moment of writing, the right form has to come by itself, without having to break off the sentence to rebuild it.

That speed is reached in one way only, and this house knows no shortcut: by repetition spaced out over time. A workbook is therefore not a shortened textbook. It is a training tool, and its main content is not the course but the sets of exercises to be done, with what it takes to mark them yourself.

This volume is written for three uses. An adult going back to writing finds training that can be done alone, without a teacher and without an answer key sold separately. A teacher finds sets ready to be handed out, with their worked answers in full. A parent or a youth worker finds what it takes to help a child along without having to invent the exercises or guess the expected answers.

The scope is the indicative mood, and within the indicative the tenses used every day: the présent (the present tense), the imparfait (the imperfect), the futur (the simple future) and the passé composé (the perfect tense). These tenses are worked on the verbs used most often in the language, that is, on those whose form cannot be guessed: être, avoir, aller, faire, dire, venir, pouvoir, voir, vouloir, prendre, savoir and devoir, plus the regular mass of verbs whose infinitive ends in -er and of those that follow finir. A few very common verbs also turn up in the sets whenever the rule of the chapter is enough to produce them, and the tables at the end of the volume then give what it takes to check.

This workbook deliberately leaves aside the passé simple, the conditionnel, the subjonctif, the impératif and every compound tense other than the passé composé. This is not a judgement on how useful they are: it is a decision about dosage. A workbook that touches everything trains nothing, because it never goes over the same ground twice.

It also leaves aside the agreement of the past participle used with the auxiliary avoir, outside the case where there is nothing to agree with. The reason is written here rather than hidden: that rule calls for being able to spot a direct object and to tell whether it stands before or after the verb, which is a skill in analysing the sentence and not in conjugation. A volume from this house will treat it for its own sake. Until then, this workbook only trains what it installs.

The chapters are meant to be read in order, and that order is not decorative: no set asks for anything the earlier sets have not installed. Skipping a chapter amounts to setting yourself an impossible exercise and then believing you are bad at conjugation.

Each set opens with a short reminder of the course. That reminder is not a lesson: it runs to a few lines because it is there to put the rule back in your head just before you use it, not to teach it for the first time. Read it, then do the whole set before looking at anything else.

The worked answers are not underneath the exercises. They are all gathered in one chapter at the end of the volume, and they are arranged there in the exact order of the exercises: the first answer in the answers chapter matches the first exercise in the workbook, and so on to the last. That separation is a device, not a page layout constraint. An answer visible out of the corner of your eye gets read before it has been looked for, and an exercise whose answer you have seen has not been done.

Write your answers before marking them, even the ones you are sure of, and mark yourself set by set rather than exercise by exercise. A worked answer from this house never gives the answer alone: it gives the expected form, then the rule that produces it and the reason why it is that one. That is the path that carries over to the next exercise, not the right form itself.

About one set in four does not deal with the chapter it sits in: it brings earlier chapters back into play, mixed together. These review sets are the most useful in the workbook and they are the ones that feel as though they are going badly. That is normal, and it is even the sign that they are working: as long as every verb on a page is in the same tense, you can answer without reading the question.

The glossary, at the end of the volume, defines every grammar word used here. The conjugation tables in the appendix are there to check a form afterwards, never to fill in an exercise: a copied form teaches nothing.

This workbook owes its terminology and its definitions to the guide to grammatical terminology published by the French ministry of national education, which makes a shared vocabulary for talking about the language freely available to everyone. It owes its agreement rules and its notes on usage to the Banque de dépannage linguistique of the Office québécois de la langue française, which answers online and without a toll gate questions that most reference works charge for.

The way the sets are built owes a great deal to public work on memory and practice, and in particular to the practice guides released in open access by the Institute of Education Sciences of the United States, whose reports are in the public domain. The sources chapter gives the full addresses.

No person is named in this volume, and that is a rule of the house: ODERSA publishes under its collective name. The mistakes that remain are its own, and it thanks in advance those who take the time to report them.