I often say that conversational French is generally quite simple by its very nature. Because speakers have to respond quickly and with little time to formulate complex language structures, conversational French tends to be made up of short sentences with lots of repetition.
In this post I want to illustrate this very feature by looking at the verbs used in the last example of real-life conversation from France. Most readers know that the verbs are probably the most troublesome part about learning French. All those multiple conjugations forms, irregular verbs and endless exceptions can be maddening.
Although I have discussed verbs conjugations before, I want to show in detail here how in real-life conversations a little knowledge can carry you a long way. In the 5-minute excerpt of real-life example number 5 from France, there are 218 verb occurrences of 60 different verbs. In the table below, I’ve put the verbs in infinitive form and sorted them into descending order of frequency with the respective percentages of all the verbs occurrences.
| No | Verb | Occurrences | % |
| 1 | être | 45 | 20,64% |
| 2 | avoir | 34 | 15,60% |
| 3 | faire | 15 | 6,88% |
| 4 | dire | 11 | 5,05% |
| 5 | aller | 9 | 4,13% |
| 6 | savoir | 8 | 3,67% |
| 7 | vendre | 6 | 2,75% |
| 8 | venir | 4 | 1,83% |
| 9 | pouvoir | 4 | 1,83% |
| 10 | parler | 4 | 1,83% |
| 11 | donner | 4 | 1,83% |
| 12 | créer | 4 | 1,83% |
| 13 | coûter | 4 | 1,83% |
| 14 | connaître | 4 | 1,83% |
| 15 | permettre | 3 | 1,38% |
| 16 | falloir | 3 | 1,38% |
| 17 | arriver | 3 | 1,38% |
| 18 | se mettre | 2 | 0,92% |
| 19 | poser | 2 | 0,92% |
| 20 | orchestrer | 2 | 0,92% |
| 21 | montrer | 2 | 0,92% |
| 22 | former | 2 | 0,92% |
| 23 | emmener | 2 | 0,92% |
| 24 | écrire | 2 | 0,92% |
| 25 | commencer | 2 | 0,92% |
| 26 | captiver | 2 | 0,92% |
| 27 | attendre | 2 | 0,92% |
| 28 | vouloir | 1 | 0,46% |
| 29 | voir | 1 | 0,46% |
| 30 | tomber | 1 | 0,46% |
| 31 | s’exprimer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 32 | s’entraîner | 1 | 0,46% |
| 33 | se payer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 34 | s’appeler | 1 | 0,46% |
| 35 | rouler | 1 | 0,46% |
| 36 | révéler | 1 | 0,46% |
| 37 | réserver | 1 | 0,46% |
| 38 | rencontrer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 39 | réduire | 1 | 0,46% |
| 40 | rassurer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 41 | progresser | 1 | 0,46% |
| 42 | prendre | 1 | 0,46% |
| 43 | plaire | 1 | 0,46% |
| 44 | packager | 1 | 0,46% |
| 45 | monter | 1 | 0,46% |
| 46 | lancer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 47 | envoyer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 48 | devenir | 1 | 0,46% |
| 49 | dépenser | 1 | 0,46% |
| 50 | convaincre | 1 | 0,46% |
| 51 | comprendre | 1 | 0,46% |
| 52 | communiquer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 53 | chercher | 1 | 0,46% |
| 54 | automatiser | 1 | 0,46% |
| 55 | apprendre | 1 | 0,46% |
| 56 | appeler | 1 | 0,46% |
| 57 | améliorer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 58 | aimer | 1 | 0,46% |
| 59 | aider | 1 | 0,46% |
| 60 | acheter | 1 | 0,46% |
| TOTAL | 218 | 100,00% |
The Key Verbs of Conversational French
What you have undoubtedly noticed is that at the top of the table there is a cluster of very frequent verbs and then a large number of infrequent verbs. This is actually very typical of all languages and even more accentuated in spoken French. Let’s look at some interesting details.
The verbs at the top of the list, être, avoir and faire, in that order, are the workhorses of French. You simply cannot have a conversation in French without using these verbs that I call the Big Three. For that reason, my essential French calendar devotes a page to each of them.
Next up are dire and aller. These are always high on the list of verbs. The interesting thing to note here is that when you add these two verbs to the Big Three and add up the numbers, the five most common verbs represent 52.29% of all the verb forms in the sample. That is more than all the other 55 verbs combined! In other words, one out of every two verbs comes from just five verbs.
When we add the next five verbs, we see that the top 10 verbs represent 64.22% or about two-thirds of all the verbs forms in the sample.
I don’t have time to go into more detailed analyses of things like tense or pronoun usage, but the results are quite similar. A small number of forms make up the bulk of uses.
Just to give you another example of how this works, here is an excerpt from a news article (Cyberpresse, March 26, 2014) on a recent provincial election campaign in Quebec. By you time you read this, the election is over and Pauline Marois (la chef péquiste), head of the Parti québécois, was defeated by Philippe Couillard :
« Les Québécois se sont fait, dans le fond, un peu malmener ou manipuler dans un sens par M. Couillard qui a voulu faire croire qu’on faisait une élection sur un référendum. On ne fait pas une élection sur un référendum. J’ai toujours dit que jamais je n’allais bousculer les Québécois », a affirmé la chef péquiste en conférence de presse mardi, à Blainville.
“In reality Quebeckers have been misled or manipulated in a certain direction by M. Couillard who has wanted people to believe that we were having an election over a referendum. We are not having an election over a referendum. I have always said that I would never rush Quebeckers”, declared the PQ leader during a press conference Tuesday, in Blainville.
As you can see, this quote from Mme Marois is a quintessential example of how the key verbs work in spoken French. It contains all the top five verbs. Faire is present four times. The top three tenses are there : the present, the passé composé and the imparfait in addition to the infinitive. Notice the use of the « on » pronoun instead of « nous ».
Mastering The Key Verbs Of Conversational French
The significance of all this is pretty simple. To understand and speak French well, you have to totally master a core number of verbs, let’s say the first five or ten. And within those ten you have to master only a few tenses and pronoun forms.
That’s the foundation upon which you have to build. When you open your mouth there’s a very good chance that you will be using one of these limited forms. Don’t waste your time learning stuff that you will rarely use.
Related Posts
1. How Many Words Do You Need To Speak French Fluently?
Stanley Aléong is a polyglot, author, musician, language coach in French, English and Spanish, language workshop facilitator and organizer of French-English conversation meetups in Montreal, Canada. He likes to share his passion for languages and believes that anybody can learn to speak a foreign language well with the right methods and tools. He has also invented a cool visual learning tool called the Essential French Wall Chart Calendar. Reach him at info@fluentfrenchnow.com.