Grammar School
A personalized French course. Built one concept at a time, from a curriculum spine that guarantees nothing is taught before its prerequisites.
Nouns, gender, and articles
The machinery under the words you already recognize. Gender is not guessable, but it is often predictable — and articles carry more meaning in French than in English.
Subject pronouns, être and avoir
The two verbs everything else is built on, and the pronouns that go in front of them. Where French assigns meaning to avoir that English gives to be.
Regular -er verbs
The largest verb family in French, roughly ninety percent of all verbs. Learning this pattern once unlocks thousands of words.
Review — Block A
No new grammar. Recombines everything from M1–M3 — gender, the three article families, plurals, subject pronouns, être, avoir, c'est vs il est, and both -er verb patterns — into fresh sentences that cross concept boundaries, the way real speech does.
Adjectives
Adjectives agree with their noun and mostly follow it — two habits English does not have. A small set goes in front instead, and for a handful of words that choice is the difference between two meanings.
Possessives
mon/ma/mes, ton/ta/tes, notre/nos, votre/vos first — these agree with the noun straightforwardly. Then son/sa/ses and leur/leurs get their own concept, isolated because son/sa/ses agrees with the thing owned, not the owner's gender — his book and her book are both son livre. Finally the vowel-elision exception that shifts ma/ta/sa to mon/ton/son, and the de + name workaround for when son/sa/ses is genuinely ambiguous.
Negation
ne … pas and the rest of the family — jamais, plus, rien, personne, que. One shared frame (ne + verb + X) covers all of them, with two genuine traps: rien/personne can be the subject instead of the object, and ne...que looks like negation but is a restriction, not a negation, and does not collapse the article the way real negation does.
Questions
Three registers for a yes/no question — intonation, est-ce que, and formal inversion — then the information words that ask about people, things, place, time, manner, reason, and quantity, and finally quel, which agrees with its noun like an adjective. Interrogative que (what) is a different word from the restrictive que in ne...que (M5) despite the identical spelling, and gets its own vocabulary id to keep the ledger honest about that.
Regular -ir and -re verbs
The other two regular verb families, after -er. -ir splits into two genuinely different patterns — one that inserts -iss- across the plural (finir, choisir) and one that never does (partir, dormir, sortir) — and -re adds a third pattern whose 3rd-person singular takes no ending at all. Telling which pattern a new verb follows, from its infinitive alone, is the actual skill; the conjugation itself is mechanical once the family is identified correctly.
Writing — the regular verb families
No new grammar and no new words. M3 and M8 each taught one verb family with the family named at the top of the page; here nothing names it. Every answer is typed, and every item makes you decide which pattern a verb follows before you can conjugate it.
Review — Block B
No new grammar. Recombines everything from M4–M8 — adjective agreement, position, and the meaning-shift set; the full possessive paradigm including son/sa/ses and the vowel-elision exception; the whole negation family (pas, jamais, plus, rien, personne, que); all three question registers plus qui/que/quoi and quel; and all three regular verb families (-er, both -ir patterns, -re) — into fresh sentences that cross concept boundaries, the way real speech does.
The irregular verbs you cannot avoid
Ten verbs used constantly in real speech, none of which follow the -er, -ir, or -re patterns already taught. Grouped by shared conjugation pattern rather than memorized flat: aller and venir, the modal trio pouvoir/vouloir/devoir, savoir/voir/connaître, the irregular -re pair prendre/mettre, and faire on its own with its weather and causative uses. faire and voir already exist as vocabulary from early in the course; this is where their full paradigms finally become explicit.
Near future and recent past
Three constructions that talk about time without a single new tense, all built on verbs already taught. aller + infinitive puts an action just ahead, venir de + infinitive puts one just behind, and être en train de holds one in the middle. Each conjugates only its first verb and leaves the second as a bare infinitive, which is why the whole module costs so little and buys so much.
Prepositions and place
The small words that decide where everything is. à and de finally meet the definite article in public, giving the au/aux/du/des contractions the corpus has been using since M1 without ever naming them. From there the same four forms run the country system, chez opens the door to people's houses, and the module closes on the hardest lexical fact in beginner French — that each verb owns the preposition it takes before an infinitive, and no amount of meaning will predict it.
Review — Block C
No new grammar. Recombines everything from M9–M11 — the ten irregular verbs grouped by shared pattern, the three constructions that place an action just before, during, or just after now, and the whole preposition system from the au/du contractions through countries, chez, position, and the à/de a verb demands before an infinitive — into sentences that cross concept boundaries the way real speech does. Block A and B grammar stays load-bearing throughout.
42 concepts · 589 required angles ·1163–1642 examples projected · 0 published