The present subjunctive — que je fasse

In one line

Take the stem from the ils form of the present, drop -ent, and add -e -es -e -ions -iez -ent.

English has a subjunctive too — it has just gone almost invisible. "I insist that he be present", "if I were you", "God save the Queen", "come what may". Those are all subjunctives, and they do exactly what the French one does: describe something not being asserted as fact. The difference is frequency. English uses it in a handful of frozen phrases; French uses it several times in an ordinary conversation.

The forms on this page

The table

Building it with finir:

nous and vous are built from the nous stem of the present, not from ils — which is why it is que nous prenions, not prennions. This is the boot-verb pattern again.

Why these endings look familiar

For -er verbs, four of the six forms are identical to the present indicative:

So for -er verbs only nous and vous change — and those two look identical to the imperfect. Context tells them apart.

This is good news: for the largest verb group in the language, the subjunctive costs you almost nothing.

The eight irregular verbs

And être and avoir have different endings as well:

aie ait aient are all pronounced /ɛ/ — three spellings, one sound.

Four verbs with a double stem

When it appears

The subjunctive never appears on its own — always after que and always after a trigger. The full list is in subjonctif-declencheurs; in summary:

Examples

Look at row two. English says "I want you to come" — an infinitive with its own subject. French has no such construction: it must be Je veux que tu viennes, a full clause with que and a subjunctive. Whenever your English sentence has "want somebody to do something", "ask somebody to do something", "would like somebody to do something", French needs que + subjunctive.

Common mistakes

That fifth one matters: Je pense que takes the indicative, but Je ne pense pas que takes the subjunctive. The same for croire and trouver.

What the subjunctive is actually doing