Conjugation tables

These tables give, verb by verb, the forms of the four tenses of the workbook. They are there to check a form you doubt after writing it, and to find a model again when you want to conjugate a verb this workbook has not drilled.

They are not there to fill in an exercise. A copied form teaches nothing, and the training in this workbook lies entirely in the effort of recovering the form before checking it. An exercise done by copying a table gives a correct page and an empty memory.

Each verb table gives three tenses: the présent (the present tense), the imparfait (the imperfect) and the futur (the simple future), which are simple tenses and fit into one word. The fourth tense of the workbook, the passé composé (the perfect tense), calls for two words and is built the same way for every verb: it is therefore gathered separately, in the table of past participles.

One last table no longer speaks of conjugation. It says which school years this volume matches, country by country, because the house shelves its books by stage and not by class, and an adult bringing this workbook to a child has the right to know where it stands. The class names are given in the official form used in each country, in French, so that they can be recognised on a school document. It is the only place in the volume where national class names serve to place the reader; elsewhere, they appear only in the title of a source that is cited.

This house shelves its books by stage and never by class, for a simple reason: one and the same class names neither the same age nor the same syllabus from one country to the next, and it changes with every reform. The stage, for its part, says what the volume assumes has been learnt and what it leaves the reader able to do, and that stays true everywhere.

Even so, an adult bringing this workbook to a child needs a concrete landmark. The table that follows gives one, and it works by age, the only quantity that can be compared from one system to another. It is not a matching of syllabuses: two countries can place the same verb tense in two different years, and they do. It says only which school years match the age bracket this workbook aims at, that of children of about eight to eleven. Adults going back to writing are concerned by no line of this table.

The third column says how each line was obtained, and the calculation is always the same: you start from the age of entry given by the country's official source, and you count the years. No source publishes the age year by year, except for France; the calculation is therefore written out rather than hidden, and it can be done again. Senegal is an exception on two counts, and its line says so: its elementary school begins with one more year than the others, and its ministry announces entry at seven where the international surveys record six.

The official source of each line is in the sources chapter, with its address and the date on which it was opened. They carry class names and ages of entry, never the spread of verb tenses across the years: that spread changes with every syllabus reform, and it is one more reason for this volume not to hold on to it.