How to Learn French Irregular Verbs (Without Losing Your Mind)

Regular -er, -ir, and -re verbs follow a rule: learn the pattern once, apply it to hundreds of verbs. Irregular verbs don’t offer that shortcut — there are roughly 75 of them in French, and each one has to be learned on its own terms. That sounds like a lot of raw memorization, but it isn’t quite as brutal as it looks once you know where to focus and which verbs actually share patterns with each other.

Why these verbs are irregular in the first place

It’s not random which verbs ended up irregular. être, avoir, faire, aller, dire — these are some of the oldest and most frequently used verbs in the language, and that frequency is precisely why they stayed irregular.

Languages regularize over time: a verb conjugated slightly “wrong” gets corrected toward the dominant pattern generation after generation, the way children (and adults) unconsciously smooth out exceptions when they don’t hear them often enough to lock them in. But a verb used constantly — in every conversation, every sentence, multiple times a day — gets heard and repeated so often that its quirks get reinforced rather than worn away. Rarely used verbs, by contrast, had less exposure to “correct” people who misapplied the pattern, so many of them drifted toward the regular conjugations over centuries.

The practical result: the verbs you need most are disproportionately the irregular ones. That’s frustrating for a beginner, but it also means the payoff for learning them is high — there’s no way around être and avoir, so it’s worth tackling them head-on rather than avoiding them.

Look for families, not individual verbs

Here’s the part that makes ~75 irregular verbs far less intimidating: many of them aren’t independently irregular. They’re irregular in the same way as a handful of other verbs, which means learning one well effectively teaches you several more.

The clearest case is compound verbs built on a base verb with a prefix. Comprendre (to understand) and apprendre (to learn) conjugate exactly like prendre (to take), just with com- or ap- stuck on the front:

• je prends → je comprends, j’apprends
• ils prennent → ils comprennent, ils apprennent

Learn prendre properly and comprendre, apprendre, reprendre, and surprendre come almost for free — you’re not learning four new verbs, you’re applying one pattern four times.

The same happens with tenir (to hold): obtenir, maintenir, soutenir, retenir, and appartenir all inherit its conjugation. And tenir itself shares its irregular pattern with a verb that isn’t even related by root — venir (to come). Je viens and je tiens, nous venons and nous tenons: different verbs, same irregular shape. That’s a second kind of family — not a prefix relationship, but two historically distinct verbs that happen to bend the same way.

Before drilling a new irregular verb, it’s worth asking: does this look like anything I already know? Often it does, and the “new” verb is really just a variation you’ve half-learned already.

Prioritize by frequency, not alphabetically

Even with families cutting the load down, you don’t need all ~75 irregular verbs across all tenses right away. Trying to learn them all at once — in every tense, in verb-list order — is the fastest way to burn out and retain none of it.

Start narrow: être, avoir, faire, aller, and the modal verbs pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, savoir. Just those eight. Just présent and passé composé. That’s a small enough set to actually get fluent with, and it covers an enormous share of real spoken French, since these verbs also double as building blocks — avoir and être form every compound past tense, aller forms the near future.

Once those are automatic, expand outward — add venir/tenir and their families, bring in imparfait and futur simple, and keep going. This is exactly what the Top 100 and Top 250 selectors on the Verbs & Tenses page are built for: instead of working through the verb list alphabetically, they surface verbs by how often they’re actually used, so the irregular verbs that matter most show up first.

Repetition does the real work

There’s a temptation to hunt for clever tricks or mnemonics for every irregular form. Some help, but honestly — for a lot of these verbs, there isn’t a shortcut. The most reliable path is just seeing the forms often enough, spaced out over time, until they stop requiring conscious recall.

That’s the point of practicing with flashcards rather than reading a conjugation table once: the app tracks which cards you get wrong more often and resurfaces them, so your review time naturally concentrates on the verb forms that haven’t stuck yet instead of the ones you’ve already nailed.

Ready to put this into practice? Head to the Verbs & Tenses page, select Top 100, limit yourself to présent and passé composé to start, and get drilling on the flashcards.