French Agreement

Agreement
A summary of the different types of agreement with links to detailed lessons on each grammatical point.

French adjectives
French adjectives change to agree in gender and number with the nouns that they modify, which means there can be up to four forms of each adjective. The different forms for adjectives depend mostly on the final letter(s) of the default form of the adjective, which is the masculine singular.

Invariable adjectives
There are numerous French adjectives which don't agree - they have a single form that does not change to reflect the gender or number of the noun. These are called invariable adjectives.

More adjectives
Most French adjectives require agreement: demonstrative, possessive, relative...

Articles
All three types of French articles (definite, indefinite, and partitive) require agreement.

Nouns
Some nouns have different forms for masculine, feminine, singular, and plural, but some don't.

Pronouns
Many types of French pronouns agree with the gender and/or number of the nouns they replace.

Verbs
There are several different types of verbal agreement.

Agreement with compound verbs
Certain French verbs have to agree with their subjects, and this is true for all compound verb tenses and moods. What you may not be aware of is that some verbs require agreement not with the subject of the sentence, but with the direct object.

Agreement with pronominal verbs
When pronominal verbs are in the compound tenses, the past participle has to agree with the reflexive pronoun when the pronoun is a direct object but not when it's an indirect object. So the trick is to figure out whether the reflexive pronoun is direct or indirect.

Agreement with verbs of perception
The rules of agreement for verbs of perception in the compound tenses are a bit different than for other verbs. Rather than agreeing with the direct object, as for most verbs conjugated with avoir in the compound tenses, verbs of perception only require agreement when the subject precedes the verb.