Verb Systems (written)

Il mange. Ils mangent. Identical, to the last sound. French spent centuries dropping the endings it still writes, and the third-person plural of the largest verb family is now completely silent — which means that in speech you have been producing it correctly by accident, and in writing you have to produce it on purpose, from the subject, with nothing in your ear to check the result against. That is a different cognitive operation, and it is why the silent -ent is one of the most persistent written errors an otherwise fluent speaker makes.

The track starts exactly there: the plurals you cannot hear against the ones you can, because ils finissent and ils veulent do announce themselves, and knowing which family a verb belongs to tells you whether your ear is a witness or a liar. From there it moves to the moods and tenses B2 argumentation actually requires, which is a narrower and more practical set than a conjugation table. The subjunctive is presented by its triggers rather than as a paradigm — il faut que, vouloir que, avant que, then negated opinion, bien que, pour que — because in practice you never choose the subjunctive, you recognise the thing that demands it.

The conditional gets the same treatment, in both tenses and all three of its real jobs: politeness, hypothesis, and the unverified claim — le ministre aurait déclaré — which is the exact form you met as a listening trap in P44, now from the production side. Then the three si schemas, the concordance des temps that keeps a narrative consistent, reported speech with its transposition of tense, pronoun and time reference, and the passive with its French alternatives, on and se faire + infinitive, which a natural writer reaches for far more often than the passive itself.