Learn the Conjugations for "Présenter" (to Present)

The French verb présenter means "to introduce" or "to present." While it's easy enough to remember because it's similar to the English, you will still need to conjugate it to say "presented" or "introducing." The good news is that this is a regular verb and a brief lesson will introduce you to its most important conjugations. 

The Basic Conjugations of Présenter

French verb conjugations tend to worry French students because you have so many words to memorize. Where English gives us only a few verb forms for the present, future, and past tenses, French gives us a new word for each subject pronoun within each tense.

However, with a word like présenter, which is a regular -er verb, the conjugations are just a little easier. That's because it follows the most common conjugation pattern found in the French language. If you've studied a few verbs already, the endings you see here should look familiar.

The indicative verb mood is the most common and it includes the basic tenses you'll need for most conversations. Using the chart, you can find the appropriate conjugation that corresponds to the subject and the tense of your sentence. As an example, je présente means "I am presenting" while nous présentions means "we introduced."

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The Present Participle of Présenter

For regular verbs, forming the present participle is simple. Just add -ant to the verb stem and you have the word présentant.

Présenter in the Compound Past Tense

While you can use the imperfect for the past tense, you may find the passé composé easier to remember. This is a compound that requires the past participle présenté, which tells us that the act of introducing has already happened.

The only conjugation you need to worry about here is transforming the auxiliary verb avoir into the present tense. You'll then follow that with présenté. For example, "I introduced" is j'ai présenté and "we introduced" is nous avons présenté.

More Simple Conjugations of Présenter

While the forms of présenter above should be your focus at first, there are a few more simple conjugations you may need at times. For example, the subjunctive is helpful when you need to question the act of introducing and the conditional is used when it's dependent on something else. Both the passé simple and the imperfect subjunctive are literary forms and typically only found in written French.

You may not need the imperative for a verb like présenter often, but it's good to know that when you do use it the subject pronoun is not required.