How To Use The Conditional Tense In French

Ah, French tenses. For an Anglophone, mastering the many different tenses of a Romance language can be difficult, particularly when dealing with ones that don’t exist in English, like the conditional tense.

Luckily, French teacher Alexa Polidoro, of the YouTube channel Learn French With Alexa, has a quick tutorial to remind you when and how to use the conditional tense. For this video, Alexa uses the verb “aimer,” which means “to like” or “to love.” The conditional tense is used whenever you would otherwise use the phrase “would” in English, so for example, the phrase, “Would you like to eat lunch?” would translate into, “Tu aimerais déjeuner?” The verb endings change depending on the subject pronoun, and when writing French it’s important to remember that even though several of the verb endings sound the same, the spelling varies each time.

Watch this video through for a more detailed explanation, and if you still need to brush up on  your French grammar, check out this video of Alexa’s on mastering French partitive articles.