They are not as practical as Englih verbs but they are absolutely necessary because there is no other solution. One thing you don’t seem to realise, probably because you’ve learned English while growing up, is that until you’ve mastered about a 150 to 200 hundred English irregular verbs with their irregular variants you can’t but write and speak an unsatisfactory English and you are constantly bothered while reading English from the past as you can’t be too sure of the forms used: those irregular forms are absolutely necessary. It is the same in French, except that, unfortunately, it is more complicated than in English.

If by different types, you mean different tenses and different moods, you can skip at the stage you’re at the passé simple and passé antérieur de l’indicatif, the imparfait du subjonctif and the plus que parfait du subjonctif. Those forms of the verb are never used in spoken French and appear rarely in written French, only in literary texts. In other words, you can ignore for now :

• je marchai, tu marchas, il/elle marcha, nous marchâmes, vous marchâtes, ils/elles marchèrent
• j’eus marché, tu eus marché, il/elle eut marché, nous eûmes marché, vous eûtes marché, ils/elles eurent marché
• je marchasse, tu marchasses, il/elle marchât, nous marchassions, vous marchassiez, ils/elles marchassent
• j’eusse marché, tu eusses marché, il/elle eût marché, nous eussions marché, vous eussiez marché, ils/elles eussent marché

To a lesser extent, you don’t need to focus too much on the futur antérieur de l’indicatif, which in practice is rarely used, that is :

• j’aurai marché, tu auras marché, il/elle aura marché, nous aurons marché, vous aurez marché, ils/elles auront marché

For learners of French whose mother tongue is English, the great number of verbal forms we have in French, or Italian or Spanish for that matter, are indeed a bit overwhelming. It’s something those languages got from the extremely complex verbal system of Latin. But the four conjugations I mention, I believe you can safely forget about for the time being.

Like petitrien, if you mean the different forms of a verb (mode, temps) rather than the different types of verbs (1er, 2e, 3e groupe…), note that many forms are just combinations of others:

• Passé composé is based on the combination of the present of the auxiliary verb and the participe passé.
• Plus-que-parfait: imparfait of the auxiliary verb + participe passé
• Likewise for passé antérieur, futur antérieur, passé du subjonctif, plus-que-parfait du subjonctif, etc.

So the only forms you would need to learn are:

• présent, imparfait, futur simple of the indicatif,
• présent du subjonctif,
• présent du conditionnel,
• présent de l’impératif,
• participe présent
• participe passé

One difference with English is that english has more forms that use auxiliary verbs. Were English would use “will” for the future or “would” for conditional, French has dedicated forms of the verb itself.

You will also quickly find there are patterns in all of that, and much less irregularity than English verbs for instance (though irregularity in English is mostly just for past tense and past participle). There are a few very irregular verbs such as avoir, être or aller, most other verbs are quite easy to conjugate once you know the basic rules.