Aller — to go | French Verb Chart

🇬🇧 Aller in plain English: the verb built from three verbs

Aller — “to go” — is the strangest of the commonly used verbs in french, because its conjugation stitches together three different Latin verbs. That is why the infinitive form aller becomes je vais in the present (from Latin vadere), j’irai in the futur simple (from ire), and keeps the all- stem (from ambulare) everywhere else. No conjugation rules produce these irregular conjugations — like the verb être and avoir, the present tense forms are pure memory: je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont. Regular verbs can wait; this one cannot, and drilling its conjugated form set is the single best verb to learn after être and avoir.

Aller earns that priority twice over. First, its present builds the futur proche: aller + infinitive = going to — « je vais manger », I’m going to eat — the tense French conversation actually uses for most future plans (yes, « nous allons aller » — we’re going to go — is correct and common, if slightly doubled-sounding). Second, in the past tenses aller takes the auxiliary verb être, and the participle agrees: « je suis allé », « elle est allée », plural « ils sont allés » — the compound past (passé composé) and the plus-que-parfait (« j’étais allé ») both follow. Say « j’ai allé » and every native ear flinches: être, always, for the use of aller in the past. Add « ça va ? » — aller moonlighting as “how are you” — and you have the whole picture of why this pronoun-hopping shapeshifter appears in nearly every french exchange ever spoken. Ten minutes with the tables above to memorize the present and the two auxiliaried pasts, and you can improve your french more than an hour anywhere else in the french language.