Complete Guide to Conjugating 12000 French Verbs (English Edition) Hardcover – February 1, 1995

I took a chance on this based on other reviews and am not disappointed in the least. I have had a copy of "501 French Verbs (3rd edition)" by Barron's for about 30 years. However, I recently decided I needed to brush up on my French and wondered if there was anything "better" out there, and I think this book meets that criteria. For one, it is much smaller, slimmer, and lighter in weight. You could slide it into a small purse if you needed to. It contains easily readable font, clear, simple explanations of conjugations and spelling patterns, and has more verbs (with their English definitions) listed than the other book. It also uses bold typeface in the index for the most commonly used verbs. Now, if you are brand new to French and do not know when to use each tense or what each would translate to in English, this book will not tell you that. However, a simple Google or YouTube search can give you that information. There are also not examples of related words and expressions for each verb (a dictionary can give you that information). But, in exchange for those, you get a very usable resource that is easy on the eyes and wrists and has around 11,000 more verbs (with their definitions) than the "501..." book. (Oh, and in this book, each conjugation uses color and spacing to help you easily see how the endings change.) I don't write many reviews, but I am making a point to write one for this resource because I am very impressed with it. I highly recommend this book and am very excited to have it!

I bought my original "L'Art du Conjuger" in France and have always found it very useful for understanding verbs in a rational way. It provides the best organization of verbs grouped by their identical conjugation forms. This allows a French learner to "chunk" related words together instead of thinking of them all as unique forms to be memorized. The phonetic rules emerge when a reader understands why all the "manger" related words, for example, have "eons" in the first person plural. Spelling begins to make sense.In this new book, at the top of the group conjugation page in tiny neat letters, I have penciled in verbs I have looked up so far. This is reminding me of new words and relating them to their verb cousins. I wish there were such a book for students of English. So many of us had no idea what grammar was until we studied a foreign, organized language.Here is what I love about my replacement English Edition of Bescherelle: the index of 12,000 verbs. Each verb on the list has an English equivalent. I have used the list, which remains full of unknown French words, as a way of developing my vocabulary and looking for sentences to "mine" from a corpus or Reverso using either the infinitive or a selected conjugation. In addition, the verb list includes both the base verbs and their reflexive forms, thereby giving a concise and convenient indication of how the meanings can change between the forms.When I saw Bescherelle for Spanish, I snapped it up. I would have preferred that is have been Spanish in an English Edition, like this one, however my French is good enough to use the translations on the verb lists. There is a certain pleasure of approaching Spanish via both familiar and need-to-know French verbs.There is an amazing amount in this small, light, sturdy volume that travels well. In this day of technical wizardry for language learning, Bescherelle is one of my three go-to books along with a old "Petit Robert" that I have tabbed, and a wonderful Larousse "Maxi Débutants 20,000 Mots" that seems to be out of print.

Didn't know what to expect, but when the book arrived today and I saw its small and compact size, I felt a bit disappointed. Then, I opened it and paged through it. Most excellent and thorough treatment and exploration of the verb structures, with a "model verb" for each nuance you might find (including obscure and defective verbs). The back of the book has thousands of other verbs (with common ones bolded) then referenced to one of the 82 model verbs. I bought a copy of Barron's 501 verbs perhaps 3 decades ago, and this book reads more comprehensive and more advanced. It does lack idiomatic phrases that Barron's possesses, as well as context of usage for the tenses and moods. Overall, a worthy companion in anyone's French education and, perhaps in a twist, je préfère maintenant que ce soit un livre petit et compact!

Provides every possible conjugation for every conceivable French verb, and yet it is tiny, light, and easy to use. It will rescue you whenever you are uncertain how to conjugate a given verb, irregular or not; or when you've lost track of how to conjugate the more obscure tenses. Language-translation apps can only get you so far: this perfect little book is a way to "teach yourself to fish" instead of depending on spoon-feeding.

Great book for all things conjugation and has a mini dictionary in the end... BUT it has one fatal flaw for me (that I fixed myself --- though time consuming). The verbs on the main pages do not have meanings translated in English. It will say: "Aimer" and tell you every possible form, but that doesnt help me entirely if I dont know what aimer means. It would aid us much more to aid definitions to each word so we could soak up a definition passively as we read each page. So I just wrote my own on each page, but it took a while and lost a lot of quality look that it had going for it. But function > quality.