First you don't need to learn every possible conjugation, because most of the verbs are regular. Look at this old version of universal conjugator for French, there were colors for verbs (unfortunately new version doesn't have this nice feature), you can notice that most verbs are blue and even the green ones are not that hard to conjugate. Only the few in red or pink are truly tricky exceptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20090713044215/http://www.logosconjugator.org/owa-verb/verba_dba.verba_main.create_lang_page?lang=FR&total_verb=8465 So my advice is to learn first to recognize perfectly to which category the verb belongs to : - 1st group, verbs -er - 2nd group, verbs -ir with gerondif in -issant - 3rd group, verb in -ir with gerondif in -ant, verbs in -re, in -oir For auxiliaires : être, avoir, aller, faire, etc... no shortcut, you shall learn each one separately. For everything else, learn to conjugate 1 verb within each category and you pretty much know all the other ones. Unfortunately you still need to learn this by heart, remember that this sole task occupies every french schoolboy ! For the first group mainly, but others groups are affected as well, all endings are the same, but there are some difficulties with ommitted leters, or doubled letters, or even some palatalization effects when joining the verb base to the ending. It's not something you want to learn as many separate rules, try instead to get a general feeling for it.

Also this is a little trick, endings in ais, ait... are for imparfait, while futur and passé composé share some magic. Use infinitif and the present forme of avoir (the same used in passé composé) and you get futur J'ai mangé --> je mangerai (manger + ai) Tu as mangé -> tu mangeras (manger + as) Ils ont mangé -> ils mangeront (manger + ont) Vous avez mangé -> vous mangerez (manger + ez) ok, this one is not exactly same construct, but i guess you got it. J'ai fini -> je finirai (finir + ai) J'ai appris -> j'apprendrai (apprendre + ai) here, the additionnal e disappear Unfortunately this trick doesn't work for all verbs (e.g -oir for instance), but it should help you for many ones.