Irregular French verbs
The majority of French verbs fall into two regular patterns, generally referred to as regular -er verbs and regular -ir verbs (and by far the majority, including virtually all new verbs entering the language, fall into the regular -er category). In French-speaking analyses, the two groups are often simply called "group 1" and "group 2".
The remaining 300 or so French verbs are generally lumped together as irregular verbs (or "group 3"). We're going to dive straight in and have a look at some common verbs belonging to this third group. The table below shows the present tense forms plus past participle of some "irregular" verbs. As well as the written French forms, a phonetic transcription of a typical pronunciation is also given (using the IPA).
If you're not used to phonetic transcription, the thing to bear in mind is that, unlike conventional spelling, a particular symbol in phonetic transcription represents "the same sound" wherever it occurs. Normal spellings often retain historical pronunciation differences which have nowadays disappeared. For example, looking at the singular forms of the first verb mettre, we see that there are two distinct spellings, but only a single pronunciation. Looking at the pronunciation thus gets rid of spelling complications and lets us "see the wood for the trees".
So what can we make of all this? Well, it's clear that these different verbs don't all follow exactly the same pattern. And it's also clear that they differ from the two regular groups. But they also share some common characteristics both with each other and, in some cases, with the so-called "regular" verbs:
In looking at French irregular verbs, we'll have to consider a few verbs such as être which are highly irregular and have more distinct forms than other verbs. Then we'll need to consider other verbs which, although following some common patterns as outlined above, differ in a few details.
Where to go next...
On the next page, then, we look at some common highly irregular verbs. Following that, we look at irregular French verb patterns in general and show that most irregular verbs actually share a lot of similarities with one another and are less irregular than verbs such as avoir and être.