How to Conjugate the French Verb Pleuvoir (to Rain)

Meaning to rain, the French verb  pleuvoir  is an easy one to study. Thats because its an impersonal verb, which means you dont have a lot of conjugations to memorize. A brief lesson will walk you through the steps for say rained, raining, and will rain in French. Pleuvoir  Is an Impersonal  Verb A rarity in the French language,  pleuvoir  falls into the category of  impersonal verbs. That means you will only have to worry about the  il  forms in the present, future, and imperfect past tenses. The reason for this is quite simple: only it can rain. Think about it for a minute. It is impossible for a human to rain, so that eliminates the need for all the other subject pronouns. I cannot rain, you cannot rain, and we cannot rain. Despite the fact that  pleuvoir  is an  irregular verb, this lesson is much easier because you dont have so many words to memorize. All you have to do is determine which tense is appropriate for your sentence. For example, it is raining is  il pleut  and it rained is  il pleuvait. A fun expression to practice this in is,  Il pleut de cordes, meaning Its raining cats and dogs. Present Future Imperfect il pleut pleuvra pleuvait The Present Participle of Pleuvoir Pleuvoir  may be irregular, but when forming the  present participle, you will use the same ending as the majority of other verbs. Simply attach -ant  to the verb stem  pleuv-  and you get  pleuvant. Pleuvoir  in the Compound Past Tense A  common way to express it rained is with the compound past tense known as  passà © composà ©. This requires the  auxiliary verb  avoir  and the  past participle  plu. Again, you only need to know the  il  present tense conjugate of  avoir, so this results in  il a plu. More Simple Conjugations of Pleuvoir Studying the other basic conjugations of pleuvoir is just as easy because theres only one subject pronoun to worry about. While the subjunctive says it may or may not rain, the conditional implies that it will only rain if something else happens. Both of these are very useful given the uncertainty of the weather. There may also be times when you encounter the passà © simple  or  imperfect subjunctive  forms of this verb. However, there is no imperative  form of  promener. Subjunctive Conditional Pass Simple Imperfect Subjunctive il pleuve pleuvrait plut plt