#french mood

[dolcevitapoetry]

La collectionneuse, 1967.

Dir. Éric Rohmer.

[sex-under-ecstasy]

[nacht-durst]

»Une pensée, une pensée de trop«

[lovefrenchisbetter]

Michael Pitt and Louis Garrel on set of the film The Dreamers, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

[skirtmag]

[bareaboo]

I get to go to a French bakery today with a friend who also loves the French culture as much as me. 🤗🥐🇫🇷

[onecappuccinoplease]

[the-language-guy]

French Verbs #2

Moods and Tenses

French has several moods and tenses for conjugation. Tenses you are already familiar with, past, present, and future. Moods, however, you are less familiar with. The five (well six, but I covered one in adjectives) moods are the indicative, subjunctive, imperative, conditional, and infinitive.

Tenses

The past in French has two options: ongoing/habitual or single-occurrence. This refers to the imperfect (ongoing) and passé composé (single-occurrence). The present is the present (no time like it), thus it is used for current actions (and the near future). Finally, the future is for actions that will take place.

Indicative Mood

Regarded as the “normal” mood, it’s the mood that expresses almost everything, from making a sandwich to wanting to kill someone for stealing that sandwich (no one else has a moist maker). It’s the mood for everything, the equivalent of the little black dress.

Subjunctive Mood

This is where French’s explicit meaning is equal to English’s implicit meaning. The subjunctive is used for probabilities, feelings, doubt (basically, if it's not a fact, it not used). That means it can be used to inspire confidence in an event. Saying “he will come” in the indicative is a lot more reassuring (even if it’s a lie) than the subjunctive. The subjunctive is also used as a dependent clause.

Imperative Mood

Hail Cesar. This mood is for orders, and is only conjugated for the second and third person. That’s it. No much discussion for orders. Oh also, they don’t have the similar sentence structure, much like commands in English.

Conditional Mood

This is your shoulda, coulda, woulda mood. This mood talks of actions that would occur if something were to happen. A could happen if B happened. That's pretty much it.

Infinitive Mood

This is the base form of all verbs, it is to “verb”. It’s usually used for a second or third+ verb after a conjugated verb. It can also be used like a noun (not exactly a gerund though, we’ll get to that another post) such as Voir, c’est croire - Seeing is believing/To see is to believe.

Now moods and tenses are reviewed, I will go into Subject-Verb-Object (sentence structure) and the intersection of moods and tenses for the verb conjugation. Happy learning!