Free French Imperative Quiz

How the French imperative quiz works

You make four choices before you start, and nothing is selected for you. If you press “Start” too early, each step still missing is outlined in red, and the button says what's missing.

• Who you're talking to: any mix of tu for one friend (parle), nous for “let's” (parlons) and vous for one person you'd speak to formally or for “you all” (parlez). The imperative in French has no form for je, il or ils.
• Affirmative or negative: telling someone to do something (parle) or not to do it (ne parle pas), or both mixed together.
• Pronouns: none (parle, finis, va), one (fais-le, lève-toi, vas-y) or two (donne-le-moi, donne-m'en, va-t'en). A reflexive verb's own pronoun, the toi in lève-toi, counts as one.
• Verbs: any of the six sets below.

The six verb sets are:

• Regular -er verbs: parler → parle, parlez
• -er verbs with a spelling change: acheter → achète, achetez
• -ir verbs like finir: finir → finis, finissez
• Other irregular verbs: faire → fais, faites
• Être, avoir, savoir, vouloir: sois, aie, sache, veuillez
• Reflexive (with se): se lever → lève-toi, levez-vous

Before you start, the quiz says how many commands match your choices.

Each question gives the person, the verb and the pronouns as pieces, so for (tu) donner + me + le you type donne-le-moi. A negative question shows ne…pas as a piece of its own, and (tu) ne…pas + donner + me + le needs ne me le donne pas. A line under the question gives the meaning and what each pronoun stands for, as in “to give · me = to me · le = le livre.”

The questions are shuffled, and each one comes up once before any repeats. If you pick more than one pronoun count, they take turns.

How the quiz marks your answers

Accents, hyphens and apostrophes count, but capitals and the exclamation mark don't. A wrong accent is marked “almost,” with the note “Check the accents.” If you leave out the hyphens in donne-le-moi, the answer is marked “almost” too, with “Check the hyphens: donne-le-moi.”

A few verbs have two spellings, and both count: paie and paye, essaie and essaye, and assieds-toi and assois-toi. The forms of the 1990 spelling reform count as right as well, such as goute for goûte and épèle for épelle.

Common slips get a note of their own, such as these:

• parles (for parle) gets “An -er verb's tu command has no -s: parle.”
• va-y gets “Before y, va takes an s: vas-y.”
• vas-t'en gets “No s here, because t' comes between va and en: va-t'en.”
• donne-moi-le gets “In writing, le comes before moi: donne-le-moi.” You'll hear donne-moi-le in speech, but the Académie française and the OQLF, Quebec's French language office, both say to avoid it.
• ne lève-toi pas gets “In a negative command the pronoun goes before the verb, with no hyphen: ne te lève pas.”
• es (for sois) gets “Être has command forms of its own, not the present es: sois.”

After every answer, right or wrong, you get a one-line reason. For donne-le-moi it reads: “An -er verb's tu command is the tu present without its -s: donnes → donne. After the verb, le comes first and me becomes moi, joined by hyphens: donne-le-moi.” For ne me le donne pas, the second sentence becomes “In a negative command the pronouns go between ne and the verb, with no hyphen, me before le: ne me le donne pas.”

You don't need a French keyboard, because buttons on the page type à, â, ç, é, è, ê, î, ô, û and the apostrophe.

You can stop at any time and see your score and a list of the commands you missed. “Practice my mistakes” then runs only those again.

Pronouns and reflexive verbs in the French imperative

After an affirmative command the pronouns follow the verb, joined by hyphens, and in a negative command they go between ne and the verb: donne-le-moi, but ne me le donne pas. Reflexive verbs work the same way, so se lever gives lève-toi and ne te lève pas. The reasons after each answer cover the other rules you'll meet:

• “Aller's tu command is va, with no -s.”
• “Before en, the tu command takes an s, joined by a hyphen: parle + en → parles-en.”
• “Hurler's h counts as a consonant, so ne keeps its e: ne hurle pas.”

Pronouns only come up where a verb takes them in real French. Some verbs come up only as negative commands (n'oublie pas, ne t'inquiète pas, ne t'en fais pas), and some only as affirmative ones (sache, calme-toi, profites-en). The forms come from the same Wiktionary-based verb tables as our French conjugation tools, which cover 600 verbs.

The quiz, the worksheets and the guide

The quiz is for French imperative practice on screen, one command at a time. For a class, the French imperative worksheets print the same verb sets on paper in four exercises, from writing the command to filling in a chart, with an answer key on a new page. To see every form and rule in one place, read the French imperative guide, which covers why parle has no -s, the irregular forms (sois, aie, sache, veuillez) and where the pronouns go. For other tenses of the same verbs, try the French verb conjugation quiz, and to look up one verb, the French verb conjugation tables give every form of all 600. If you learn Spanish, Italian or German too, the Spanish commands quiz, the Italian imperative quiz and the German imperative quiz mark every answer “right,” “almost” or “wrong,” with the rule behind it.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

Conjugation tables come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). Verbs are ranked by Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list, built from OpenSubtitles 2018 (CC BY-SA 4.0).