A small tool, built with care.

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Hi, I'm Émile.

I was born and raised in Quebec, so French is my native language. I grew up never thinking about conjugation, it was the same way every English-speaking kid never thinks about whether to say "ran" or "runned". You just know.

That changed when I started spending time with adult French learners, friends, coworkers, immigrants and international students arriving in Quebec. Whatever apps they were using, whatever classes they'd taken, they all hit the same wall in the same place: conjugation. Not the vocabulary. Not even the pronunciation. The 14+ tenses, the irregular stems, the past participle agreement, the subjunctive triggers, the part of French that needs deliberate, structured practice and that no app actually delivers.

Why I think I can help

I'm not a French learner. But I am a language learner.

I spent years getting to a working level in Spanish, and I tried just about every method on the market to get there: textbooks, language apps (Duolingo, Babbel, Pimsleur), italki tutors, immersion trips, the works. I have strong opinions, formed the hard way, about what works and what doesn't.

The pattern I noticed across all of them: most language apps are great at the first 100 hours and useless after that. They make you feel productive without actually building the skill you need. For conjugation specifically, the existing options were either too shallow (a 30-second drill in Duolingo) or too dry (reference sites like Le Conjugueur with no practice loop).

So Bonjour Verbs is my attempt to build the tool I wish had existed for me when I was learning Spanish, applied to French, where I have the native-speaker depth to actually back it up.

What we believe

• Typing beats tapping. Multiple choice teaches you to recognize. Typing teaches you to produce. We don't use multiple choice. Ever.
• Depth beats breadth. We don't try to teach you French. We try to make you unstoppable at one specific, brutal thing: conjugating French verbs across every tense and mood.
• Offline-first. The whole app works without Wi-Fi. Account optional. Your progress is yours, on your device, no matter what happens to our servers.
• No dark patterns. No streak-anxiety guilt-trips, no fake "limited offers", no engagement-bait notifications. We make money when you pay for Pro, not from your attention.
• Small and focused. One person (and one cat) means we can build slowly, ship thoughtfully, and not chase metrics that don't matter.

About the cat

That's Poppy in the photo above, the second member of the team, and our chief of distractions. She has no opinions on French conjugation but very strong opinions on the warmth of the laptop. She is responsible for every keyboard-related bug. Léo (the rooster mascot) was originally designed for her approval. She approves.