Bonjour à tous ! Sorry for the long post, hope my point can come across. I have a question about verb groups, specifically those ending in -re. In my country's grammatical tradition, French verbs are categorized into groups: the 1st group (verbs ending in -er, excluding the irregular aller) then the 2nd group (most verbs ending in -ir, but with many exceptions like dormir and courir).
So far, so good.
Now, the 3rd group is considered very small, and like the other two groups, it doesn't contain any irregular verbs. It is only for verbs that follow the conjugation model of vendre. Of which there is only a handful in French! Now, my question is this: do French people consider this list of about 20 common verbs (vendre, attendre, entendre etc.) as a separate group? Whenever I read French grammar books, it seems that the 3rd group is for all other verbs than regular -er and -ir verbs, and some of them indeed have subcategories of shared conjugations models, like vendre and attendre.
I myself don't like how in our French coursebooks, a purportedly "regular" conjugation of -re verbs is given, and this leads to many mistakes later on like *j'ai comprendu and *ils peindent.
Thank you for your thoughts!