How to Conjugate French -RE Verbs

French verbs fall into three regular families, and -re verbs are the smallest and least talked-about of the three. Verbs like vendre (to sell), attendre (to wait), répondre (to answer), and perdre (to lose) follow a shared, learnable pattern — once you see it, a whole group of verbs stops being a guessing game. We’ll use vendre as the running example throughout.

The core pattern

To conjugate an -re verb in the present tense, drop the -re from the infinitive to get the stem, then add endings for each subject. For vendre, the stem is vend-:

• je vends
• tu vends
• il/elle/on vend
• nous vendons
• vous vendez
• ils/elles vendent

Notice the il/elle/on form: it takes no ending at all. It’s just the bare stem — il vend, not “il vends.” This is genuinely different from -er and -ir verbs, both of which add something in the il-form (il parle, il finit). It’s the single most distinctive feature of this pattern, and it’s also the one learners most often get wrong by reflexively tacking on an -s or -t that doesn’t belong there.

The same stem-plus-ending logic applies across the whole family: attendre → j’attends, il attend, nous attendons; répondre → je réponds, il répond, nous répondons; perdre → je perds, il perd, nous perdons.

Building other tenses

Once you have the present tense stem down, the other tenses build on it in mostly predictable ways — with one important twist.

Futur simple and conditionnel don’t use the full infinitive as their stem the way -er and -ir verbs do. Instead, they use the infinitive minus the final -e: vendre → vendr-. So:

• Futur simple: je vendrai, tu vendras, il vendra, nous vendrons, vous vendrez, ils vendront
• Conditionnel: je vendrais, tu vendrais, il vendrait, nous vendrions, vous vendriez, ils vendraient

This is worth flagging explicitly: for -er verbs like parler, the futur stem is the whole infinitive (parler-). For -re verbs, you have to remember to drop that trailing -e first, or you’ll end up with an extra syllable that doesn’t exist in real French.

Passé composé uses avoir as the helping verb plus a past participle ending in -u: vendu, attendu, répondu, perdu. So “I sold” is j’ai vendu, “she waited” is elle a attendu. This -u ending is a reliable signal for regular -re verbs — most of the family shares it.

Subjonctif présent goes back to the -re stem and adds the same endings -er verbs use: que je vende, que tu vendes, qu’il vende, que nous vendions, que vous vendiez, qu’ils vendent. If you already know the -er subjonctif pattern, this one is free — it’s the identical set of endings applied to a different stem.

A few exceptions worth knowing

Not every verb ending in -re is regular, and it’s worth knowing the biggest exceptions so they don’t blindside you:

• prendre (to take) and its family (apprendre, comprendre) break the pattern in the plural: je prends, il prend look regular, but nous prenons, vous prenez, ils prennent drop the -d- entirely — it’s prenons, not “prendons.”
• -ompre verbs like interrompre (to interrupt) add an unexpected -t in the il-form: il interrompt, not the endingless il interromp the core rule would predict.

These aren’t reasons to distrust the pattern — they’re a short list of well-known outliers, and this app tags them accordingly so you’re not caught off guard mid-drill.

Ready to put this into practice? Head to the Verbs & Tenses page, select vendre, attendre, or répondre alongside présent, futur simple, and passé composé, and start drilling on the practice page.